[Talk-us] Proposed mechanical edit - remove is_in:continent in USA

Mateusz Konieczny matkoniecz at tutanota.com
Wed Mar 20 07:03:04 UTC 2019


is_in:continent=* is subjective as both division Earth landmass into continents[1] and boundaries between continents[2] are mostly subjective. There are many competing ways to split world into continents and OSM is not proper place to record all of them or one selected system.

In rare cases where one desires to assign locations to continents it can be done using location data inherently included in OSM objects and explicit tags added to part of objects are not really useful anyway.

is_in:continent tag should be removed to avoid confusing newbies and discourage adding new instances of this undesirable tag.

I propose to run an automated edit restricted to USA that will remove all instances of this tag.

Please comment no matter what you think about this idea! I will not make the edit without a clear support so please comment if you think that it is a good idea and if you think that it should not be done.

Plan is as follows:

I will take full responsibility for all edits and if anything goes wrong I will fix it.

Each changeset contains a single element or group of close elements to avoid edits spanning across large areas (it is impossible in cases where edited object itself spans very large area).

This is proposed as reoccurring edit and may be made as soon as new is_in:continent tags appear.

Documentation page on OSM Wiki is at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Mechanical_Edits/Mateusz_Konieczny_-_bot_account/remove_is_in:continent_in_USA

I have experience with automatic edits. I already made automated edits to remove tags across Poland and I recently processed old-style Wikipedia tags across USA.


This message is crosposted to OSM USA slack channel 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Continental_models-Australia.gif
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundaries_between_the_continents_of_Earth
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