[OSM-talk] Good practice, and should we rely on defaults?

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

I just noticed a recent edit to the good practice page and it made me
reflect about the current consensus.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Good_practice&diff=next&oldid=2276559

The edit was surely executed in good faith, and while I generally agree, it
touches a sensitive topic.
The changes to the title seem ok, loosing "your" is probably an
improvement, while saying that "objects in reality" means "specific
objects" is probably the same.

Regarding the U-Turn-Restrictions in Brazil, it may be fine to encourage
not mapping them explicitly (it is already on the restrictions page), but
there is a slippery slope (in this instance it seems ok, because mapping
restrictions is not only tedious and the precious mapper time could be
spent better, relations also increase the data complexity for everyone and
make the following edits more complicated).
On the other hand, from a legal point of view the situation is no different
from the absence of maxspeed signs in the second example, where we do map
implicit limits, or similar to the turn restrictions we map because of
specific divider markings (and in some places you may even cross a
continuous divider line to turn left into a property). There is a specific
object (an intersection) because of which the U-turn is forbidden.

For example, highway=pedestrian (at least if signed as a pedestrian zone
with no additional signs), may allow cyclists to use the road, or may not,
it depends on the country. Generally we rely on people "translating" the
local rules to normalized universal tagging (ideally, in reality there are
local tagging preferences to model the same situation). While we could
leave this all to the routing engines and defaults, it typically produces
bad results, so that mappers who want to use the data now, are adding tags
to describe explicitly what might in theory be resolved by encoding
language and region specific rules.

For example if a country has a rule, no spitting on the street, we should
not add this to every street. Or "no stealing" to a shop (potentially any
shop).

The second example is somehow contradicting the rule i.e. it weakens the
rule by showing an example where it is not applied, so that's ok as it adds
relativity ;-)

What are your thoughts about this rule, what is it meant to prevent, and
what is beyond the intentions?

Cheers,
Martin
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