[OSM-talk] Xybot

Ben Laenen benlaenen at gmail.com
Fri Oct 24 12:10:26 BST 2008


On Friday 24 October 2008, Andy Allan wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I see that someone is running a bot across the entire planet, and I
> don't see any discussion of it on the mailing lists. The bot is
> called "xybot" and the user is apparently "xylome"
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/xylome - I believe this is the same
> person who Frederik was referring to on a previous thread.
>
> I'm asking now for this person to publicly justify to all the
> contributors to OpenStreetMap why he or she knows better than they do
> about tagging? This bot has now effectively blacklisted a number of
> perfectly plausible tags, including "annotation", "node", "notice",
> "remark", "grade", "track", "water", "automate" - and has also made
> some potentially data-corrupting assumptions. Take "grade" for
> instance, all occurances of which have now been changed to
> "tracktype". Which is a hell of an assumption about the use of the
> "grade" tag, and what people potentially might want to mark with that
> in the future. This isn't just typo fixing, this is going way beyond
> that.

And there are things on 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/User_FixTypo3Euro:Xybot that 
even remove information, like 

"maxspeed:forward" => "maxspeed",
"maxspeed:in" => "maxspeed",

I don't know what the latter means, but the first one obviously means 
lost information since maximum speeds can well be applicable to only 
one direction.

Also makes me wonder why it's preferred to have :opposite instead 
of :backward

"maxspeed:against" => "maxspeed:opposite",
"maxspeed:backward" => "maxspeed:opposite",

Ben




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