[OSM-talk] Worldwide non-surveyed tag edits

John Baker rovastar at hotmail.com
Wed Jun 11 13:48:20 UTC 2014


Frederik,

> 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.

Cool.
If you change it from a policy to guideline that is fine. At the moment they are a policy that it says everyone must follow or they will be reported and possibly banned and my point is they are ignored (by the thousands these types of edits) and therefore not enforced and are therefore pointless. I have rarely even seen discussions about mechanical edits.

The example I gave is typical of these "mechanical edits".

Better still is a guideline on how to make good mechanical edits without all the red tape 90% voting, etc (there are some very vocal on these lists of the old school dinosaurs (you know the usual anti-import, anti-aerial imagery, anti-using-a-computer-to-edit-the-map) that would object in principle to *any* of these edits no matter how sane as shown by the OP. So they will never pass anyway.)


> I don't see why we should weaken the guidelines to allow everyone to
> automatically "fix" things as they see fit.

Fundamentally they are written with a stance for anti/do not do these edits. They actively discourage any of these much needed clean-up operations as people just want bad data in the database. There is no balance there. I had the same issue with the aerial imagery/armchair mapper guidelines in the wiki until I balanced them somewhat.

I expect you have never done a simple "mechincal edit" to fix something  (like my example) and followed the policy to the letter.

Why not try it record the time it takes to do it? If you are lucky the change will take maybe a few minutes and you will have weeks of emailing and waiting to actually get "permission" to do it is allowed at all. I look forward to you practising what is preached and seeing the outcome.

If someone is writing "policy" without following it ever it is meaningless. Someone that regularly follows guidelines is ideal for writing these.

> Yes, in fact we used to explicitly recommend that people use their user
> name, a colon, and their own key name to distinguish special private
> tags from public ones. I am not sure if these recommendations still
> exist on the Wiki but it used to be common practice.

Never heard that was 'official', any sources for this do you have any or just on the back of a fag packet somewhere?

> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20140611/a05f8726/attachment.html>


More information about the talk mailing list