[OSM-talk] Remove validation rule asking to add highway=footway to railway/public_transport=platform

[Andy Townsend]

On 27/05/2019 12:08, Jo wrote:
> And the disease is spreading:
>
> https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/Jnd
>
> I'm scared. This needs to be mitigated, but indeed, how?
>
Suggestions about tag improvements by an editor are not a new thing - 
JOSM has had them for ages.  Occasionally there are examples of people 
accepting suggestions like this without thinking, and what I'd normally 
do in such cases is to comment on the changeset concerned and politely 
explain why in this particular case the suggestion isn't a good one.  
You'd also need to ask the user whether they were prompted to make an 
"improvement" by the editor or whether they added it manually (speaking 
personally I'd usually draw railway platforms as areas and I can 
certainly think of places where I'd draw a linear footpath along as 
well).  The emphasis has to be on "politely" - users accepting an 
editor's suggestion can't be blamed if they don't know the backstory.

Separately to that I've occasionally mentioned places where JOSM's 
suggestions don't seem right and the issue has always been addressed 
immediately by the JOSM developers, and I've never seen a response along 
the lines of 
https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues/6409#issuecomment-495231649 , 
for example - they are more professional than that.   I therefore can't 
suggest, as I would with JOSM, to contact the developers about it directly.

It's perhaps also worth mentioning that I can think of at least one 
example where a particular editor was "effectively banned"* due to 
serious shortcomings.  In that particular case the bug was to rewrite 
all longitude values with a fixed value so that everything touched moved 
to a ring around the planet.  Clearly the current issue with iD is not 
even close to that level of seriousness, so "direct action" against any 
iD edits would be both unwarranted and out of proportion.

Note that this is intended to be an answer to "what can I, as an 
individual mapper do about this creeping data problem".  Answers 
involving "write a replacement for iD" fail somewhat the short-term 
practicality test.

Best Regards,

Andy

(writing in an entirely personal capacity)

* Specifically by looking for all edits by it and reverting them and 
taking other action to make users and the developers aware of the problem.