[OSM-talk] Was the deletion of Null Island reasonable?

[stevea]

On Jan 9, 2022, at 9:14 AM, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't understand the fuzz

I  say this very politely, as people really go out of their way to speak English in a lot of OSM (many mail-lists, this one included) and I deeply respect that:  "fuzz" is "a fluffy or frizzy mass of hair or fiber."  I think the word you want is "fuss:"  "a display of unnecessary or excessive excitement, activity, or interest."  Also, "fuzz" is an informal / slang term in some dialects of English (American English included) for "police," some see it as pejorative.  So, Martin, I am very glad to read your post and mine is a tiny, tiny quibble; I thought you'd like to know, and maybe get a bit of fun from it.  It's one of the more amusing "tiny English errors" I see, some of them bring not only a smile to my face, but a real chuckle-out-loud, a minor LOL.  While I am multilingual, I only wish my German, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, etc. were as excellent as the English I read here.  Thank you to all who use English so very well!

> What's the point of explicitly marking "things" defined only through their coordinates? Mabe it is about collecting information about them, e.g. wikipedia/wikidata links?

Those (wider wiki-oriented sources) exist, those would be good additions (to a node representing Null Island), there are many other such "references to structured ontologies" in OSM.  (I use "ontology" to describe something like wikidata.  If you wish to discuss / argue my word choice, please email me off-list).

> There is nothing that an observer could contribute to such mathematical points which basically turn the principle of OSM to its head (instead of observing something, recording it's coordinates and describe it and publishing the result, the procedure is inverse: starting from the coordinates you depart to see that there is nothing specific).

I'll say two things about this again:  first, Null Island is "OSM's zero point," the point from which all other references in our ENTIRE MAP start and derive.  That alone makes it "somewhat important" (to OSM), at least:  it is unique and in a sense "a part of" every single place that OSM represents as data.  Second, due to a poor selection of the domain or range of my initial search or solution set I have had occasion to have mistakenly included in some OSM work I've done —  as others doubtless will in the future.  This highlighted an oversight on my part that I included (or "included beyond") OSM's zero point (Null Island), allowing me to recognize my error.  Were it for not the inclusion of Null Island as a node in my data (because the node WAS in OSM), I would have not detected my error, but I did.  This only happened once to me, but I was grateful (and pleasantly surprised) that Null Island was there, I detected it and I was able to back out my faulty logic of the broadness of my domain search.  This sort of error reduction potential is quite worthy and is another perfectly valid reason to include a node for Null Island in OSM.