[Talk-us] Retagging (in general)

[Bryce Nesbitt]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 1:01 AM, Greg Morgan <dr.kludge.gm at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 2:58 PM, Richard Weait <richard at weait.com> wrote:
>>
>> My initial reaction to any automated edit is to break out in a rash.
>
>
> I don't have the same reaction.  A long time ago I added building=entrance
> to buildings.  That tag was deprecated in favor of entrance=* at some point.
> A mapper comes along and changes building=entrance to entrance=main with a
> script.  I was about to send the mapper a thank you because he saved me a
> bunch of time, when his work was backed out.  So there I am left making the
> same changes manually that the script had already made.  My manual edits
> added no additional value to what the script had already accomplished other
> than wasting my time.  I could have worked on other more important issues.

+1 on this.
I see a strong benefit to careful mechanical tag gardening.

The argument gets hauled out that "this will impact data consumers".  That's
short sighted.  Over longer periods of time data consumers benefit
from consistent
tagging.

Instead we could create a low volume
"data-evolution-alerts at openstreetmap.org" mailing
list, where tag changes could be announced in advance.  Data consumers could
do what they are doing now, or register for alerts regarding the tags
they care about.

building=entrance to entrance=main is  particularly easy case because
there is no semantic change.
type and wood to leaf_type and leaf_cycle is harder, because of a
(probably beneficial) semantic change.