[OSM-talk] Highways tagging vs Polygon

[Matt Amos]

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Nic Roets <nroets at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 3:37 AM, Matt Amos <zerebubuth at gmail.com> wrote:
>> so... frequently running bots over entire countries to change the
>> speed limit, or adding (by my count) about 20 million new tags to the
>> DB, or dealing with inconsistencies between different editors, etc...
>> that doesn't hold any water?
>
> We already have bots changing so many things. And some of them irritate me
> immensely.

and you want *more*?

> But they are forcing me to align my tagging style to the rest of
> the community.

as you say, sometimes moderate bot activity can have good
side-effects, but i don't want to get into a position where we rely on
bots to do editing tasks.

think about it this way; if you had a huge file and you needed to
replace every one of 20 million instances of one word with another -
the first time you'd use sed (or some regexp-replace in your editor).
the second time too. when it got to the tenth time you might wonder
whether it would have been better to replace the word with a variable
(entity reference / #define / whatever) and push the lookup work from
the producer to the consumer.

> Do you have any idea how many "tiger:" tags are already in the database ?

yes: 629,644,961. its shocking and horrible. maybe we should run a bot
to delete them? especially the ones on the nodes - they're really
annoying.

> If there inconsistencies between editors, then there disputes in the
> community that needs to be resolved.

there are bound to be. the editors may get fixed and a bot run to
harmonise the tags. but soon they'll get out of sync again and the
bots come out again.

cheers,

matt