[OSM-talk] What is an ID?

[Lester Caine]

Tom Hughes wrote:
> On 02/08/11 18:43, Lester Caine wrote:
>> Richard Mann wrote:
>>> I think he was joking about reusing ids (he was illustrating the point
>>> with the sort of daft temporary fix that someone might do ... if they
>>> were daft)
>>
>> Well someone has set up the system to reuse them !!!!
>> http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/1/history
>> THAT is a joke :(
>> PLEASE can someone disable that corruption before it goes too far?
>
> Nobody has setup a system to reuse anything.
>
> All you are seeing there is the result of badly written programs and the
> like doing perfectly normal REST writes to node 1. When such mistakes
> are made people revert them. Shit happens, and we deal with it.

> How exactly do you suggest that we "disable that corruption"?

I just started at '1' to see how good things were, and a few of the nodes I then 
worked through showed questionable changes ...
Actually it's interesting looking at some of the raw history. There are a block 
below 1400, many of which are original nodes, but some seem to have these 
strange edits, then there is a jump to 77858, which I presume was a hick-up 
somewhere along the line very early on, except that the 1300 series nodes post 
date 77858, so something is/was going wrong somewhere? Some of these early node 
numbers have been edited earlier this year ...

"Shit happens, and we deal with it." still has the problem of identifying where 
the shit has happened and working out how to deal with it. Increasingly looking 
at the history I've been spotting places where useful tags have been removed 
when later edits were added but there is no mechanism to flag what is being 
deleted? I've not noted down the node numbers, but a series of edits relating to 
wheelchair access seem to have removed the name or other tags rather than 
maintaining them ...

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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