[OSM-talk] Id stability

[Steve Bennett]

3) Why people intentionally destroy ids, and whether there are better
ways of achieving their goals?

(I seem to recall someone explaining that sometimes objects are
deleted and recreated in order to discard the change history,
particularly for large relations.)

It would definitely be valuable to have the identifiers be more
persistent. I've been linking to some from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Keefe_Rail_Trail . I believe Richard
F has made comments in the past that we shouldn't do this, and we
should have explicit persistent identifiers instead, but there is no
support for that yet.

Steve