[OSM-talk] bot proposal: shop values cleanup (low use values only, 1 used 250 times, three over 100 times, many used less)

[Andy Townsend]

On 22/04/2023 08:38, Mateusz Konieczny via talk wrote:
> Wiki should not be mindlessly obeyed but it at least tends to be right.

[citation needed]

The OSM wiki tends to be many things, among those "somewhat helpful" and 
"usually edited in good faith"; but "tends to be right" is very much a 
stretch.

The current status of any page shows you what the last editor of a 
particular page thought about something.  Looking at the history, you 
can see how other people thought too - and sometimes their views are 
very different.  The wiki doesn't necessarily help people understand 
what OSM mappers in general think, because only a tiny fraction of OSM 
mappers update the wiki.  It's also not a great place to compare 
versions and see who added what (there's no "blame" equivalent**).

One of the places where the wiki fails badly is where people have 
different views.  Partly this isn't the OSM wiki's fault - 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Forest tries its best to describe 
the debacle there, but there are many pages that contain essentially the 
same information, and monitoring and maintaining each and every one of 
them would be more than a full-time job.

Often wiki pages are written by people only with knowledge that "this 
OSM tag exists in the OSM database" not with any real-world 
understanding of what a particular feature is.  Often there are links to 
wikipedia, when wikipedia has fundamentally different definition of what 
some particular word means.

Another problem is maintenance.  For example 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Walking_Routes#United_Kingdom is 
just a couple of links, but the do look useful.  The first, 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Long-distance_footpaths_in_the_United_Kingdom 
exists, but some of the information is both not especially relevant and 
somewhat misleading, e.g. "Completed 12/09/2009" - in reality there is 
continual refinement going on with all of these as more detail is 
added.  Occasionally people introduce gaps by mistake and people fill 
them in.

The other link 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Tagging_Guidelines#Tagging_Access_Provisions 
just redirects to 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_Kingdom#Tagging_Access_Provisions 
which does not exist.  Clearly someone edited something but didn't 
realise the links that they were breaking.

Best Regards,

Andy

** wikis do have the concept - see 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiBlame .