[OSM-talk] RFC: what are empty nodes and how should we use them?

[Peter Wendorff]

  On 16.08.2010 22:34, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Peter Wendorff wrote:
>> Deletion of attribute-less objects will never be a problem, as long 
>> as nobody tries to get information from that objects (not included 
>> from my point of view).
>
> Wrong because someone could try to build an object from them in the 
> next step.
As I said, that would be no problem, as long as this "someone" does not 
download my changes in between - he already has his already uploaded 
nodes in his editor.
> [...]
>  To me, the logical equivalent would be covering every unmapped place 
> in "fixme"s.)
Would that be wrong?
For me that sounds completely acceptable: missing data in the map should 
be fixed - it's in some cases not worse than wrong data.
A white area in the map of course is sometimes obviously a todo hint, 
but I don't see, why the fixme note would be wrong there.
> As I said, I am not religious about this particular "personal touch" 
> that people may have in mapping. What I dislike is the basic idea of 
> creating rules that everyone must follow (combined with "but what's 
> the PROBLEM in following my rule?").
Well - I didn't want to give a rule for that. In contrast I would like 
to leave it as it is - allowing you (and others) to use empty geometry 
to describe todo's and - on the other hand - allowing everybody to 
delete objects that has no observable information for the database.
The latter includes allowing bots deleting empty nodes, just because 
they are often created by faults, too.
> We must create rules only as a last resort; only where there is no 
> other way but for everyone to do the same.
>
> The real art is to identify the places where one must have rules, and 
> leave anything else alone. Every extra rule makes OSM less good. 
> That's my basic message - the "..." is just an example.
If you want, don't take it as a rule - more like a hint: if you use 
empty nodes, there are people, who think, they are useless and can be 
deleted; and as they don't have information for everybody except you, 
that's true for the biggest part of the community.

regards
Peter