[Talk-us] Change sets covering entire US?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 08.11.21 04:50, Tod Fitch wrote:
> Change set 113500241 [1] showed up in my RSS feed today. I have mixed feelings about adding name:en=* values for all cities in the US but I guess it makes some sense.

It is a mechanical edit that probably violates our rules. Because
mechanical edits have the potential to be useless/problematic on a
larger scale than a random newbie edit, there is a requirement that they
be discussed before execution.

In this particular case, a discussion might have led to the advice to
either shelve the idea altogether, or run the script in smaller batches
- that's why I assume no discussion has taken place.

Personally, I think that any sane data processing pipeline will revert
to using "name" when the particular name it wants to use (e.g.
"name:en") is not defined, so in my opinion this edit adds zero value,
and instead has created hundreds of new versions of objects (and makes
every future version of these objects larger by one unnecessary tag).

A frequent problem with mechanical edits like this is also that, because
the individual object is not looked at, some random city created
somewhere by a vandal is given a boost in credibility ("hm, this has
been edited by three people in the course of two years, surely if it
were fiction, one of them would have noticed...?").

Bye
Frederik

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