[OSM-talk] Redaction requests - the information I need

[Paul Norman]

> From: Pieren [mailto:pieren3 at gmail.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2012 2:45 AM
> Cc: Talk Openstreetmap; data at osmfoundation.org
> Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Redaction requests - the information I need
> 
> On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 11:17 AM, Paul Norman <penorman at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> > Planet dumps only include visible objects so just the deletions will
> > cause the objects to not be included.
> 
> I was thinking about older planet dumps. If I remember, Frederik made
> once a complete clean-up, including in older planet files. I guess it is
> harder today with so many replication files available (full dumps +
> diffs). So 'bad data' are never completely removed from OSM servers.
> 
> > If the server does store history there is the possibility of an issue.
> > The proper way to fix this would be to add information about the
> > redaction API calls to the replication diffs in a backwards-compatible
> way.
> 
> Yeah. Enhance the osc format is probably the best solution. Btw, is the
> 'redaction API' documented somewhere ? I don't see any thing in the main
> API wiki doc. Is it hiden because of the possible dammages or is it
> limited to certain OSM user accounts ?

The redact action is restricted to accounts with the moderator role
(basically DWG and server admins). In practice I believe I'm the only one
who calls it anymore but I've never called it directly, only through the
bot.

https://github.com/zerebubuth/openstreetmap-license-change/blob/master/redac
t_changeset.rb#L104 is how the redaction bot calls it.

I'm sure the documentation needs improvement but it's a very specialized
call which only one piece of software ever calls.