[OSM-talk] Undiscussed (?) edits removing lesser-used highway=* tags

[Andrew Guertin]

Hi,

The user GerdP seems to be going around editing things with unusual 
highway=* tags, apparently in an attempt to standardize them.

In my opinion, some of these changes are positive and some are negative, 
but the negatives outweigh the positives.

As a positive example, GerdP seems to have searched for highway=trunk on 
a node, and removed the tag. (e.g. 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1245912029/history)

As a negative example, they seem to have deemed the tag 
highway=residential_link bad, and replaced it with either 
highway=service or highway=residential. 
(https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/18820600/history, 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/262798921/history).

An in-between example: on 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/38089492/history, 
highway=stepping_stones was replaced with highway=path. While this helps 
consumers use the data, it loses information that should have been kept 
(perhaps with surface=* or something similar).


Does anyone know if this was discussed anywhere? I've contacted GerdP 
with a changeset comment at 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/35109232 but there hasn't (yet) 
been much time for a response. Also note that this isn't a single 
changeset but rather something GerdP does regularly, so many changesets 
over many days.

--Andrew

P.S.: We should have something like a cleanups at osm.org mailing list so 
that these kinds of things have a place to be discussed, because there 
are a lot of positives to be had...