[OSM-talk] Worldwide non-surveyed tag edits

[Jochen Topf]

On Mi, Jun 11, 2014 at 10:00:14 +0200, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> On 06/11/2014 05:12 AM, John Baker wrote:
> > Your suggestion that you should message everyone worldwide (what in
> > every language?!) for what is often a typo or understanding of existing
> > tags is not practical.
> 
> There are some - very few indeed - cases where a fix is really obvious.
> Sadly, in almost every case, people start with fixing the obious, and
> once they're done with that, they change things that are far from
> obvious (like for example, replacing every occurrence of name=McDonalds
> with name=McDonald's, replacing landuse=wood with natural=wood, or
> changing a gas station with attached convenience store to a convenience
> store with attached gas station).

Where you only see "very few cases" I see thousands and thousands of obvious
and needed fixes. Every time I look at taginfo or the OSM Inspector or
KeepRight, I see all the crap that is in the OSM database. And we need all the
tools we can get to fix them. And we need all the people we can get to fix
them.

> The line is very thin and the guidelines currently err on the side of
> caution.
> 
> > a) that is ridiculously stupid.
> > b) it takes a ridiculous amount of time.
> > c) people just ignore it and do it anyway. They do it all the time. I
> > expect one of the only reason you actually noticed this is the large
> > edit boxes in the history.
> 
> The guidelines make sure you don't make stupid mass changes (because the
> guidelines give others a chance to detect the problem beforehand). If
> you ignore the guidelines and nobody complains - fine. But if somebody
> complains then you having ignored the guidelines is reason enough to
> revert your edit, and we don't have to start a big discussion about
> whether your edits made sense or not.

That is a very bad way to make rules. Everything is forbidden and normally we
ignore if you step over the line but if we don't like your nose, we will arrest
you...

One of the biggest selling points of OSM was always: Everybody can edit, and
yes, mistakes happen, but on the whole it is better to allow people to exercise
their common sense than to block everything by forcing people to go through
a lengthy process before they can change anything. Why is that difference whether
I go outside and collect data, or draw from aerial images or whether I use XAPI
to find a spelling mistake?

I think the "mechanical edits policy" has stepped over the line here. A
mechanical edit is one where somebody uses a special program that, based on
some simple criteria, does *automatic* changes. Using existing tools like JOSM
and XAPI to find problems, looking at them manually and doing edits, is not a
mechanical edit and should not fall under that policy. The way you find the
problems is not the criteria that should decide whether an edit is
"mechanical", but the edit itself. Doing a mass edit is not the problem, doing
it blindly is.

Somebody adding hundreds of miles of road from a GPS track is not a problem,
somebody tracing hundreds of buildings from aerial images is not a problem,
somebody fixing hundreds of typos is not a problem. The real problem only
occurs when the edits are done without looking at existing data, not connecting
the new road to the existing roads, not checking whether there are preexisting
buildings, not taking into account different spellings in different countries.

And sure there will be problems and we will deal with them as we always have.
But that doesn't have anything to do with mechanical edits.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.jochentopf.com/  +49-721-388298