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

[Brian M. Sperlongano]

On Wed, Apr 6, 2022 at 7:59 AM Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> my thought is that, in general, the default should not be added to OSM.
> For example, I don't want 95% of streets in Germany to receive a
> surface=asphalt or a motor_vehicle=yes!
>

I tend to agree as a general rule, and I've been annoyed, for example, of
StreetComplete prompting me with quests to record the surface value on
every street I walk by.  Of course I can configure SC to turn off this or
that quest, but it seems like it would be a good cue to editor software
generally to de-emphasize prompts for users to add information that is
normally assumed to be a certain default in a particular country or region.

Another tagging that I think falls in this bucket (at least in my area) is
when to tag lanes=*.  It seems like it would not be terribly useful to tag
lanes=2 on every highway=residential in my town, while it would probably be
appropriate to tag lanes=* for perhaps any highway=tertiary and above
regardless of value.  I generally go with "common sense" on this kind of
thing but it sure would be nice to be able to reference documentation on
assumed defaults.

We need to establish good ways to make country-wide (or region-wide)
> defaults available in a machine-readable way. Tagging those defaults
> onto every single object in one country because the default in this
> country might be different from the default in the next country would
> (a) create too much data inflation and (b) mean an edit orgy every time
> the default changes in a place.


Wikidata is a sensible place to store this information as it is here today,
performant, and OSM data consumers are already using it to conflate
externally-linked data with OSM.  It would be very straightforward to
document something like a default speed limit in a city using wikidata.
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