[Talk-us] Proposed mechanical edit - remove objects that are not existing according to source of GNIS import that added them

[Mark Wagner]

On Wed, 20 Mar 2019 21:46:59 -0600
Martijn van Exel <m at rtijn.org> wrote:

> > On Mar 20, 2019, at 9:01 AM, Mateusz Konieczny
> > <matkoniecz at tutanota.com> wrote:
> > 
> > I plan to run an automated edit that will revert part of the GNIS
> > import that added them and delete objects that never had any reason
> > to appear in the OSM database in any form, at least according to
> > GNIS data.
> > 
> > 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.   
> 
> 
> Thanks for bringing the idea up. It actually did come up fairly
> recently on Slack
> https://osmus.slack.com/archives/C029HV951/p1550176430103000 
> 
> My view is that we would be missing an opportunity to have mappers
> review these locations and update the areas concerned. These nodes
> exist mostly in ‘undermapped' / remote areas that could use some
> human mapper attention. So I’d be in favor of trying to resolve this
> using some human driven cleanup first.

My experience is that this will mostly just make things worse.

There was a MapRoulette task a while back for cleaning up
unmodified GNIS-imported schools.  There were only a few of them left
around me, but the most common result was that an armchair mapper would
drag the node to a nearby non-house-looking building, trace the
building, and merge it with the imported node.  Not one of these was
actually a school.

-- 
Mark