[OSM-talk] TIGER cleannup

[Robert (Jamie) Munro]

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Beej Jorgensen wrote:
> Paul Fox wrote:
>> but the fact that it seems the tiger maps show every old farm-trail 
>> or track that's ever existed in the last 400 years, even if it's been
>>  impassable and unmarked and on private property for 150 of those 
>> years.  :-)
> 
> So true.  A track in northern California that was popular about 50 years
> ago but is now virtually impassibly overgrown with sage is still marked
> in the census data.

In our case it would be good to keep that track on the map, but mark it
as impassable or disused or something, and also mark it with an end_date
tag (even if you can only guess a year to the nearest 20). Someone needs
to write documentation for a standard format for start_date and end_date
tags, allowing both dates and a measure of precision (e.g. if a road is
3000 years old, it would be good to store a date of 1000BC, but indicate
that this is +- 100 years or whatever).

Currently, according to zappy, there are 449 start dates and only 1 end
date in the system. Most of the start dates are UK format (dd/mm/yyyy),
but 23 are just years, 1 is yyyy/mm/dd and only one is in the yyyy-mm-dd
format. The one end date is just a year, and it is on a node.

IMHO, the format we should standardise on is yyyy-[mm-[[dd]], i.e.
ISO8601, with month and day optional if not known, but not the basic
format (with no hyphens) because that format is IMHO confusing. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Calendar_date

What would be the best wiki page name title to use for a page like this?

Robert (Jamie) Munro
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