[OSM-talk] Concern over untagged ways and map roulette

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 22/05/2025 16:48, Greg Troxel wrote:
> I see a lot of deletionist activty as vandalism.

I'd be wary of throwing around the term "deletionist" - it sounds like 
someone just looking for an excuse to DELETE!

And of course the term "vandalism" is totally inappropriate here, 
because vandalism requires an intent to damage, whereas what we have 
here is at most a misguided intent to help. (We should all keep that in 
mind - too many mappers are far too quick to shout "vandalism" and then 
what word will we use when someone is *really* intent on causing damage?)

Deleting an untagged way that has been sitting around for a longer time 
does not cause any damage (the way would not have shown up on any map, 
or be considered in any kind of evaluation). Deleting such a way is at 
most a missed opportunity to improve OSM (by finding the right tags for 
it) - it is not something that makes OSM worse than it was before!

My personal approach to stuff like that is looking at who made this. If 
it is something that was done by a mapper 10 years ago and the mapper 
was called "student_12345" and was active for two days, then I will 
likely delete the lot. The same if I find that the mapper was called 
"import_abc" and has uploaded 500 changesets with broken stuff. If the 
original uploader was careless then I will not apply the care they have 
been lacking.

If, on the other hand, the data has been created by someone who seems to 
still be active in OSM then I will probably add a changeset comment 
asking them to look at it.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"