[OSM-talk] New dimension of vandalism

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2009/8/26  <Lulu-Ann at gmx.de>:

Hi Lulu,

I'm happy that you finally put your edits to this list. Actually
before I was changing the page I was trying to involve as many
contributors as possible. I not only posted on talk but also on
talk-de and also on talk-it there was a note about this discussion.
Therefore I think that "vandalism" is not really adequat. After some
time of discussion I was pointing out on the list (referring also to
the diff) that I changed the page. It was not hidden, but announced
(many changes in the wiki do neither follow voting nor are announced
to the lists).

Besides this, the German highway-definition already stated the tagging
according to "importance". Please also note, that "physical state" is
not absolute but highly relative to the surrounding/context, and that
it didn't work neither (there was the need for "exceptions").


> There was a change on the highway key wiki page, that interferes with the concept presented here.
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php?title=Key%3Ahighway&diff=317630&oldid=317451
>
> User Dieterdreist has changed the description so the highway tag is no longer used for the objective physical description but for a subjective feeling of "importance". Millions of highway tags would need to be reviewed if this change without proposal and approval would become valid.

come on, they don't have to be reviewed, because
a) this is already common practise
b) people refer more to the specific definition than to the general one.

> Two important aspect of routing, the estimation of time to arrival and finding the fastest route, will fail if the highway tag does not stick to physical facts.

No, I could say the contrary.

> Several other established or proposed tags like maxspeed defaults are negatively affected by changing the highway concept of tagging.

No. It seems you didn't look at the changes. AFAIK maxspeed defaults
are about "in town" and "out-of-town" and (in Germany) about
dual-carriageways and motorways. They are all not affected.

> New OSM contributors learn bad practice from the start when the first tag they learn is switched from hard facts so unsure estimation.

Well, it was after an open discussion. What do you mean by "hard
facts"? I added a reference to physical tags (width, lanes, surface)
to the page that was missing before. In which way do "physical facts"
help you to classify a road? Is a unsurfaced road always a track? Is a
road with 4 lanes always a primary road?

> Probably new users have already done large damage to the map by mapping or changing highway tags from the facts to the feeling schema, resulting in worse quality of calculated routes.

please. I didn't change a single specific tag and adjusted the main
vague definition to common practise, you are not only exagerating, you
are IMHO completely wrong.

> IMHO this is a new dimension of vandalism. I don't think that this is done by concurring commercial map providers, but this subtile method of weakening the OSM tagging schema and therefor lowering the quality of OSM data would be a really cool attack against OSM, because it is not possible to search for and revert such changes systematically.

Personally I see it contrary.

> I think that we, the community, should not accept such severe changes made to extremely used and highly established without the proposal + approval workflow.
> I ask you to support the reverting of the unapproved changes in the wiki and in the mailing lists.

Did you set up a proposal to do so, that I can vote about?

> I also think we need a consensus that tag descriptions for tags that are used more than 100.000 times shall not be changed without a proposal.

OK, I agree (and I would set the limit not to 100000 but maybe 2000).
But I am not sure, if the wiki is a better place than the
mailing-lists to do so.

Cheers,
Martin