[Talk-us] Sidewalks in Austin without any tags

[Andy Townsend]

On 25/07/2018 14:12, Bryan Housel wrote:
> ...
>
> Find more productive ways to improve OSM than threatening to delete people’s work.

(ahem)

Hi Bryan,

What I'd normally suggest in a situation like this is that someone 
comment on some of the problem changesets and offer help and 
assistance.  However, it looks like people have tried to do that, at 
least a couple of months ago:

http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussion-comments?uid=3773201

but a reply hasn't come back yet.  That might mean that their email is 
misconfigured, or the account has been abandoned, or they're just too 
busy to respond.  There's no biographical info on the account in OSM to 
suggest any other ways of getting in touch, though the name might 
perhaps suggest to a casual observer that it's somehow connected to the 
University of Washington.  You've previously mentioned 
https://www.opensidewalks.com/ but that is unfortunatly quite low on 
meaningful content, and seems to mostly talk about an existing OSM 
proposal and the previous Seattle import attempt 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Seattle,_Washington/Sidewalk_Import 
(where thankfully actually mapping was done instead).

Do you (or does anyone else on this list) have a direct connection to 
the TaskarCenterAtUW account?  If so it'd be great to let them know that 
people have been trying to get in touch with them, and to get some 
information about the plans to add meaningful tags to the data that's 
been added already).  Obviously in-OSM contact methods exist but if 
someone reading this actually knows them they'd understand the context 
better.

Unfortunately just "more data" is not necessarily an improvement - 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/603909001 is an example of something 
that as it currently stands really does add no value. However it's clear 
that the user who added that was aware that there was more to be done - 
they wrote "Will use JOSM to put in the appropriate tags".  It'd be good 
to know if or when they plan to do that, or whether some other approach 
(Maproulette?) might be approriate if they're no longer able to do so 
and need other people to tidy up after them.

Best Regards,

Andy