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

[Frederik Ramm]

Mateusz,

as far as I am concerned, *all* is_in tags are unnecessary at best and
potentially misleading, and could be removed. I'd prefer adding these
tags to the auto remove list in editors though, rather than running
mechanical edits to remove them.

I strongly object to doing this in a *recurring* fashion for two reasons:

1. I don't want us to go down the wikipedia route where we have an army
of bots running to "clean up" contributions. If there's a consensus that
a tag is unnecessary then put it in the major editors.

2. I am in favour of mapper freedom. It is ok to recommend not using a
certain tag, but it is a whole different game to automatically and
regularly remove certain tags from the database so that even if someone
made the conscientious decision to use a tag, they are *still*
overruled. If you intend to run a bot like that in regular intervals
(which I would recommend not to do), then you need to provide a
mechanism for individual mappers to ask the bot to keep its hands off
something ("matkoniecz:bot=no" or so).

Bye
Frederik

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