[OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> Am 09.09.2015 um 09:01 schrieb Mateusz Konieczny <matkoniecz at gmail.com>:
> 
> Currently it is done on really limited scale and still may be stopped.


I doubt this has the potential to become a big scale "problem" because there aren't sufficient sources and traces to reconstruct the world as it was hundreds or thousands of years ago (not to forget that there were much fewer people in these times, and much fewer alteration of the world in general).

FWIW, there have been several mentions of historic objects naming "hundreds" or thousands of years in this context of former railways on the lists. Actually the first railway was built in 1830, that is not even 200 years ago, and this is also more or less the period where you can get detailed spatial information (good maps) from. Please stop FUD about people completely mapping the past into OSM and obfuscating the present thereby.


> 
> OSM is map of the current state of the world - not map
> of the world how it was yesterday, 10 years ago or five thousands ago.


Nobody is advocating to map the past, what is discussed is mapping those elements of the past which somehow have lasted or have had a strong impact that is still observable today. You say these objects would make mapping more difficult and confusing but the opposite is true: it makes mapping more sensible when the relevant context is present (including traces of the past).

cheers 
Martin