[OSM-talk] this has to stop: iD user mistakes all over the place

[Serge Wroclawski]

Folks,

This post doesn't represent the DWG in any way, but as someone who
does DWG work, and closely monitors his local area, I think I have a
bit of expertise in this area.

In my experience, iD users do not make any more mistakes than any
other editor in relative terms. In other words- if 80% of edits are
done in iD- then we should see 80% of mistakes by iD users. In my
experience, the kinds of editor errors that are being discussed
(deletion of objects, etc.) are not happening in a greater relative
quantity by iD users than any other editor- and for the kinds of
issues that the DWG gets involved in, eg edit wars and problematic
imports, JOSM users are by far the biggest problems.

The fact is that the amount of data issues we have with OSM users is
decreasing, not increasing. iD's tagging support makes things
generally better for the beginner and intermediate user.

We do have problems the things like addresses, splitting of features
and especially relations- but I'd argue that these are not the
editor's problems.

Addresses in OSM are confusing because we have so many different ways
to represent addresses (as attributes of a node, as attributes of a
building, as a raw node inside a building, as a relation, as an
associatedStreet, etc.), and relations are very complicated.

Multipolygon could be replaced with something like "area" as proposed
by Jochen, but until that happens, we're stuck with a very complex
data representation that's a pain to understand and an even bigger
pain to work with.

This is fundamental to the data model itself, and not the editor.

I'm not an iD user myself, and I do think that the developer/community
communication could be improved, but it's been a large net positive
for our project.

- Serge