[OSM-talk] Bot amended relations today

Werner Hoch werner.ho at gmx.de
Tue Oct 5 10:44:35 BST 2010


Hi there,

On Montag, 4. Oktober 2010, Dave F. wrote:
> User werner2101 has been busy today amended relations:
> 
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/werner2101/edits

First, all of the edits are done manually, not with a bot.
All the edits are done one by one. I check every relation before editing 
it and hopefully add a usefull changeset comment.

More about the methods of the changes below.

> In a local case to me he's changed tags within a route relation from:
> 
> tag k="route" v="canal"
> tag k="type" v="route"
> 
> to
> 
> tag k="type" v="waterway"
> tag k="waterway" v="canal"
> 
> Which is incorrect as it removes the route tag & the canal way
> already has the tag:
> 
> <tag k="waterway" v="canal"/>

From time to time other users are not happy with my changes and they 
usually write me a mail. I think this happend maybe 5 times over the 
last year, then I try to explain why I've made the change. Somethimes 
the other user agreed with my changes sometimes not and I'm reverting 
the change.
In the same time I've improved maybe 3000 relations.

I guess it's impossible that all improvments are improvements for every 
other, too, but I at least think, that most of my changes are.
 
> As he's used a bot to go worldwide, I thought I'd better flag it up.

As stated above all edits are done manually. The edits are global as all 
over the world (the planet) there are improvable tags on relations.
 
> I'm sure not all his edits are incorrect, but I think it would be
> worth checking locally.

The methods of my changes:
The starting point is a list of rarely used realtion types [1] of all 
relations on the planet. It's a tab seperated listing of relations with 
relation ids, tags, user, changeset, version, ... (at the top of [1]).

I load the list into oocalc. I've some macros in oocalc that allows me 
to:
  * load a relation into josm (with the remote pluggin)
  * browse the relation on OSM
  * view the history on OSM
  * get a statistic for a username.
by selecting a cell in oocalc.
This setup enables me to do lots of manual edits and checking several 
things before I make the edit.

Most of the changes are simple typo corrections or missing type tag 
corrections.
A relation without type tag and members with inner and outer role is 
most likely a multipolygon.

Others are improving tagging:
e.g. a relation with type=route route=rcn is most likely a bicycle route 
that should be tagged as type=route route=bicycle network=rcn.
... and so on.

The change DaveF doesn't like is the change of the tags 
  type=route route=canal
into:
  type=waterway waterway=canal

I thought this change is correct, as the waterway relations are usually 
used to describe the waterway, just like all the other waterway related 
relations in the planet [2].

There's also an ongoing proposal on the waterway relations to clean up 
all the waterway mess [3]. The tagging of the proposal is used a lot for 
newly created waterway relations by users careing about waterway related 
stuff.

Regards
Werner (werne2101)

[1] http://www.h-renrew.de/h/osm/osmchecks/02_Relationstypen/planet.html
[2] http://www.h-
renrew.de/h/osm/osmchecks/02_Relationstypen/planet_waterways.html
[3] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relations/Proposed/Waterway



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