[OSM-talk] Taginfo challenge

[SomeoneElse]

On 14/03/2015 21:48, Andreas Goss wrote:
>> Just because people some people make bad decisions when mapping, doesn't
>> mean that the whole project has to lower its standards.
>
> And some people in this case are what? 99%? I seriously there are many 
> people who would spend a second though when changing Toilets=

As an aside I'd guess, based on the tag-changing changesets that I see 
in the history list locally, that between 30-50% of them are 
problematical in some way:

o Sometimes what was tagged originally was nonsensical, and the correct 
response should be "clearly that makes no sense; I need to resurvey it" 
rather than "let me just change the tags to something that looks valid"

o Sometimes some "non-standard tag" is removed because the person 
editing remotely simply does not understand the concept that the 
original mapper was trying to get across.  It might very well be that 
there _isn't_ an appropriate tag in wide use in OSM right now; but 
removing the original mappers tag is not the right thing to do.

o Sometimes the person changing the tags is acting in good faith based 
on external QA such as the JOSM validator*, or the OSM wiki. An example 
would be the assumption that the wiki that "coniferous" was synonymous 
with "not deciduous".

So to answer the original question, I think that most mappers _would_ 
give a second thought to an "obvious" tag change.  It doesn't mean that 
they wouldn't change "hihgway=footway" to "highway=footway", but it does 
mean that they'd have a look at see if it really did look like a footway 
first.

Cheers,

Andy


* and it's worth mentioning here that every time I've raised a validator 
"false positive" with the JOSM developers they've resolved the issue 
almost immediately.

** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug8nHaelWtc