[OSM-talk] Wikipedia/Wikidata admins cleanup

[Christoph Hormann]

On Wednesday 04 January 2017, Oleksiy Muzalyev wrote:
> > Well - in OSM use of and reliance on this expensive resource is the
> > core of the whole project and we use automated edits only when they
> > are deemed desirable by the expensive humans on a per case basis.
>
> I agree with this idea completely. At the same time it is so easy to
> check if a Wikipedia page actually exists programmatically [1] while
> a mapper ads a wikipedia=* tag. Certainly, it a bit more complicated
> in the JOSM as it may be used offline. But in any case, why to check
> it manually? It is a kind of a routine task which could be done by a
> machine.

It is not the check that needs to be manual, it is the edit.

In other words: finding errors can often be automatized to a high degree 
with good reliability - just look at the OSM Inspector coastline and 
area views which are very useful for the community.  Fixing them is 
something where a manual approach with local knowledge is considered 
desirable by most mappers though.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/