[Talk-us] Caliparks re-tagging paths?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

   I find this article a bit worrying:

http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2016/03/caliparks-app-safer-hiking-trails-california/475047/

It is about an app that displays tracks in California public parks based
on OSM. When officials were unhappy about unoffical paths being displayed,

"Park managers have tried to delete these trails from OpenStreetMap, but
they often pop back up",

(I sure hope they pop back up, and if I catch any park managers deleting
existing paths I'd have a word with them), and then

"developers at Stamen, GreenInfo Network, and Trailhead Labs essentially
“muted” the data that identifies the errant trails by tagging them with
a code from differentiates them from authorized paths."

I would be interested to find out how this "muting" happened and if it
has any adverse effects on other data consumers. There's certainly good
and bad ways to do it, but I don't remember anything having been
discussed with the community. Could someone from one of the groups
participating in this commercial editing enlighten us about what exactly
is being done, which tags are changed/used, etc?

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"