[OSM-talk] Id stability

[Toby Murray]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 8:39 PM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Flickr does this too, by the way:
http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/09/28/thats-maybe-a-bit-too-dorky-even-for-us/

Until we come up with a better way of persisting IDs, people WILL use
node/way/relation IDs to link to OSM data. When I expand a POI to an
area I generally try to use the original node as part of the new
closed way to maintain some kind of link but that's not a solution and
would still break . And as far as I know, no real work has been done
on this. I think it would take an API change and good editor support
to implement correctly.

Toby