[OSM-talk] OSMF silently sides with Russia?

[Andy Townsend]

On 20/11/2018 13:09, Tomas Straupis wrote:
>
>    Can you give an example where things in OpenStreetMap are mapped in
> a different way than overwhelming majority of world thinks?

If "the UN" counts for "the overwhelming majority of the world", there 
are quite a few examples.
The UN recognises territories the don't currently exist on the ground in 
their UN-regognised form (e.g. Western Sahara) and it has places such as 
Gibraltar on its "non-self-governing" list that have had referenda about 
their status (e.g. Gibraltar).

Neither is necessarily "wrong" - they're just different criteria. The UN 
has resolutions (which may confusingly conflict with each other 
depending on the politics of the time), OSM has 
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/d8/DisputedTerritoriesInformation.pdf 
.

>
>    Note: I'm not asking to tag Crimea as just Ukraine (which would be
> my personal opinion). I'm asking to have an open discussion of
> disputed territory rules

An open discussion of how we recognise territories in OSM and how to 
handled places where we know there are disputes makes sense; I'd already 
suggested exactly that in the "Add some tag to identify disputed 
borders" thread.

To be clear though - it would be a big change for OSM to stop trying to 
make an "accurate" map (in terms of "who controls what") and instead to 
try and create some sort of "politically correct" one. To do that you'd 
really want to round up some OSMF members to lobby the OSMF board to 
change the policy, as it's really not something that the DWG makes up as 
it goes along.

Best Regards,

Andy