Re: [OSM-talk] How to handle Maps.Me garbage?

[Andy Townsend]

On 22/06/2016 14:13, Michael Reichert wrote:


I decided not to write a changeset comment because it seems to me to
be a waste of time to comment a Maps.Me user's changeset. (There less
frequently respond to comments than iD users)


Because of the language difference I suspect that the chance of a reply 
from this MAPS.ME user will be less than from others (unless you try an 
address them in Korean - but that really isn't difficult these days with 
machine translation).


I've certainly had replies from MAPS.ME users in the UK, including 
someone doing similar things (in Danish - I commented on the changeset 
in English and Danish).


Best Regards,
Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] MAPS.ME edits - partly sub-standard

[Andy Townsend]

On 21/06/2016 10:12, joost schouppe wrote:
The scope for growth of our community with Maps.me is phenomenal. Of 
course there is room for improvement. But it's never going to be easy 
to lower the barriers to participation without losing quality.




I don't think that it's an explicitly MAPS.ME problem - it's a "new 
mappers" one.  There have been "ban iD", "ban Potlatch" etc. complaints 
since those editors have existed, and new mappers using JOSM are just as 
likely to make a mess of things as with other editors, but the resulting 
fallout tends to be rather more nuclear.


That said, there may well be some mileage in the ideas below:


Some ideas:

- maps.me  should probably stick to simple-to-map 
objects when it adds data. Complicated stuff should go in a note.


- if the maps.me  data is old, any added object should 
be a note by default


We get "notes by default" from other apps that use old data (e.g. 
Navmii) and in that case it's just as annoying to deal with - actually 
more so in that case as the notes are anonymous.


- maps.me  should investigate why response is so low 
to changeset comments. Maybe OSM messages can be integrated in the 
app? Maybe added info should be Note by default until they have 
responded to a test message sent through the OSM messaging system. 
(though in my experience response to any OSM message is low, not just 
maps.me  users)


I'm not convinced that the reply rate from MAPS.ME users is much lower 
than other new mappers.  As you say, new mappers often don't reply - 
probably because they think of OSM as a map or a database rather than a 
community, and databases don't in general talk back to you.  However, 
that's just a gut feeling on my part - someone would need to go through 
changesets and discussions and count up to be sure.


The same options are available with unresponsive MAPS.ME users as with 
other users - try and contact them via changeset discussions, and if 
that doesn't work drop a mail to the Data Working Group explaining the 
problem.  We can send them a message via the "block" mechanism that they 
have to read before they can continue editing (without actually stopping 
them from editing for any length of time).  Usually the problem is a 
language barrier one, or they're just not getting emails because they 
don't monitor the account they signed up with, or they're just "not very 
communicative", and once it's clear that the problem won't go away of 
it's own accord they'll engage positively.


- maybe we should have a manual review system in place for ALL maps.me 
 changesets, until someone marks the account as 
"experienced"


That's pretty much what's happening already (just not with MAPS.ME users 
only).  In many places around the world new mappers are either 
explicitly welcomed or helped along through their first few edits. 
There's even been a recent help question about using whodidit for the 
purpose:


https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/50331/how-to-search-for-go-map-editor-in-whodidit

Cheers,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] MAPS.ME edits - partly sub-standard

[Andy Townsend]

On 22/06/2016 16:23, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:


2016-06-22 17:07 GMT+02:00 Martin Koppenhoefer >:


yet another issue 



and another type of issue:

...

I suspect that this mailing list isn't the best way of logging bugs with 
MAPS.ME.


https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/3623 suggests emailing 
b...@maps.me ; maybe try that?


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Re: [OSM-talk] MAPS.ME edits - partly sub-standard

[Andy Townsend]

On 24/06/2016 14:40, Eugene Alvin Villar wrote:


This defect has already been reported to their GitHub repository:
https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/2902



You've seen https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/3623 though?

("This bugtracker is not actively monitored, b...@maps.me could be used 
for reporting")


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Re: [OSM-talk] Automated edits code of conduct

[Andy Townsend]

On 12/07/2016 17:29, Éric Gillet wrote:


So at least one user should reach out to the contributor before 
involving the DWG ? That would be great but that's not currently the 
case in my experience.



The vast majority of my DWG interactions with other OSM users are "if 
you see something amiss, please comment on the changeset discussion so 
that the person making a mistake knows there's a problem".  It's 
actually rare for DWG members to see something and act immediately; most 
are reported to us directly, often by multiple users.


What might happen is that we jump fairly quickly on obvious sock-puppets 
(see for example the ones at the top of the 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SomeoneElse/blocks_by list - but even 
in that case the recipient has a clear route to engage with the DWG to 
say "you made a mistake").


To my mind, the biggest and most important requirement in 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Automated_Edits_code_of_conduct is 
"document and discuss".  It's important that large-scale edits 
(especially worldwide ones) catch the ear of those mappers and data 
consumers that they're going to affect.  Also, sometimes well-meaning 
tag-changers sometimes don't have as much domain knowledge as others 
about the things that they're proposing to change (the "trees" change 
mentioned upthread was a good example of this - most needleleaved 
(coniferous) trees are evergreen, but not all, and the person making the 
(undiscussed) change didn't know that).  Discussing proposed changes in 
the open means that everyone can benefit from that wider knowledge.


It's also important to remember that OSM is supposed to be something 
representing the real world, not a bunch of data that is semantically 
described by the wiki.  Essentially, it's a geography project, not a 
computer science one*.  There will be cases where the data that's in OSM 
is "a bit woolly", and doesn't quite get the sense of a real-world 
entity across (but without an on-the-ground survey it's difficult to say 
what the problem is).  Sometimes the fact that OSM mappers have captured 
something that "doesn't quite fit" OSM's frequently used categories is 
really useful, because it identifies something that we should categorise 
better - so it's important that the _sense_ of what the original mapper 
reported is kept, rather than their square peg being hammered down into 
a round hole**.


I've read through your posts in this thread, and while it's clear that 
you have an issue with the way that things work now, I can't see what 
that problem actually is.  Can you provide some specific examples of DWG 
actions that you think were inappropriate?  What do you think should 
have happened instead?


However do bear in mind that just like the vast majority of people in 
OSM everyone in the DWG's a volunteer.  Some volunteered; others were 
asked to join but everyone's unpaid.  Also bear in mind that everyone in 
OSM's a human being and deserves a basic level of respect - even new 
users creating invalid POIs simply because they don't realise they're 
editing a worldwide map.


Best Regards,

Andy (aka http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SomeoneElse , member of the 
DWG but writing in a personal capacity).



* full disclosure - I'm part of the problem here, as I'm a computer 
scientist rather than a geographer by trade.


** part of my background was in statistical analysis of 
electromechanical data (while that was still a thing), and a key lesson 
from there is that you need to keep as much data as possible in order to 
be able to detect odd or expensive events as they occur - part of this 
has since been described as "black swan theory", but there's a bit more 
to it than that.


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Re: [OSM-talk] Automated edits code of conduct

[Andy Townsend]

On 14/07/2016 13:00, Richard Fairhurst wrote:

Éric Gillet wrote:

That would be slightly faster to execute than the first approach I was
suggesting, but then how would you prove that you checked every
and all features ?

Well, the best way to prove that you checked everything is not to fuck
things up, which of course you won't, because you've checked everything.


My first changeset discussion comment on suspicious edits is often 
"you've changed X to Y, but to me it looks like a Z; are you sure?" for 
exactly that reason.  If I can pick somewhere that I'm familiar with as 
an example, I'll use that.  If someone doesn't answer the question and 
instead replies "But the wiki says ..." then clearly we've got a problem.



If you fuck things up (for example, by changing name=McDonalds to
name=McDonald's on an independent restaurant that is actually called
McDonalds), then by definition you haven't checked sufficiently, have you?


... at least one example of which is "Mac Donald" in Banfora, Burkina Faso:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/128265146#map=14/10.6400/-4.7537

:)

Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Automated edits code of conduct

[Andy Townsend]

On 14/07/2016 16:19, Éric Gillet wrote:
So if the changeset correct 300 restaurants but 2 are "damaged" by the 
automated edit, would the edit be bad enough to be reverted or not be 
done in the first place ?


I'd revert it.  It's essentially the same as the "trees" example 
upthread (where the mechanical editor thought incorrectly that deciduous 
implied broadleaved, and vice versa).  It's easy for people processing 
OSM data to say "obviously these are mistaggings; I'll assume that 
people have just got it wrong".  However, going to Burkina Faso (in the 
Mac Donald example) is inherantly much harder; we need to respect 
someone who's actually been there.


Where there a small number of potential mistaggings the correct approach 
would be to _ask the previous mapper_ or if that doesn't work _ask 
someone else in the area_.  OSM provides tools that makes it really easy 
to do exactly that.


You might argue "but surely if more data is corrected than damaged the 
overall quality is improved?" but you'd be wrong.  It's important to 
leave as much original data there as possible for downstream 
processing.  I spent a good few years in the 80s and 90s arguing the 
superiority of statistical approaches to data interpretation over 
rule-based ones.  To cut a long story short, there's a reason why e.g. 
the anti-spam measures used with email today are Bayesian (statistical) 
- it works.  Don't second-guess what data consumers might need if you've 
not been one.


That doesn't mean that if you see that someone has mapped an obvious 
primary highway as "highway=pirmary" that you shouldn't change it - but 
do always ask yourself if by "tidying up" you're actually removing 
information from OSM, even if that information is "there is some doubt 
as to whether the original mapper knew what they were doing".


Best Regards,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] Viewing pre-redaction OSM tiles?

[Andy Townsend]

On 14/07/2016 19:49, Michał Brzozowski wrote:

I would swear I saw a page doing exactly that (with a comparison slider).
The reason is I suspect that some website uses old cc-by-sa OSM data
(due to its nature, with their own updates) without attribution nor
with modified map data released.


Apologies if I've misinterpreted the question, but if you saw something 
comparing against old OSM data it might have been using tiles from 
http://map.fosm.org/ ?  That's based on pre-licence change OSM data.  
There are some people updating that, but not many.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] highway=crossing tags removed in changeset.

[Andy Townsend]

On 13/07/2016 17:40, Dave F wrote:


I'm unsure why the nodes originally had crossing=no, but I think 
removing the highway tag makes them even more inaccurate. 


Leaving aside the "undiscussed mechanical edit" issues (see 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2016-July/076403.html for 
my comments on that) in this case it's definitely worth a conversation 
with the mappers about what they were trying to encapsulate, and with 
the "crossing" wiki page editors about why 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:crossing is as it is.  I suspect 
part of that reason in the latter case may be recent edits by wiki 
editors with differing views on what "crossing=no" means resulting in a 
bit of a mess.


I don't believe that I've ever been to any of the places that were 
changed in https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/40612462 so I'm 
guessing based on imagery and familiarity with nearby places (e.g. the 
one in Cannock Chase).  Looking at one of the examples in that 
changeset, http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2714463033 , it looks like 
"somewhere where you can cross the road but there's no traffic 
control".  It is a specific place where you can cross - footpaths 
terminate at that node.  I personally wouldn't tag it as any sort of 
crossing since there's no infrastructure, although it's clear that 
whoever built the footpath did anticipate crossing there rather than 
elsewhere.


The wiki page for highway=crossing (currently) says "Where definitely no 
crossing is possible/legal" for "no".  Unfortunately in itself that's 
very unclear - many places where crossing is legal it's essentially 
impossible to do so (e.g. many footpaths crossing dual carriageways), 
and there are also plenty of places where crossing is possible but 
illegal (e.g. in places where "jaywalking" laws exist).


Looking at another example, https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/190732659 
, it's clear that you can cross (based on the name of the bus stop if 
nothing else!) so "crossing=no" looks wrong there too.


There are of course only 24 nodes in total, so whoever cleans this up 
should ask the mappers of those nodes what it was they actually meant.  
My guess in some cases is "you can't cross here", in others "you can, 
but there's no infrastructure" and in others again "actually, there's a 
zebra crossing or some lights".


Also, any follow-up in-depth discussion about what "crossing=no" means 
is probably best had on the tagging list.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Beginning with contribution

[Andy Townsend]

On 05/08/2016 07:56, Abhishek Gupta wrote:


1. First of all, is OOP being used in the project? Can I have support 
the project in a way it improves my OOP skills?


Yes, lots of the software are OSM is OO based (and so is pretty much 
everywhere else in the world today - after all, even OO COBOL is a thing 
http://www.objs.com/x3h7/oocobol.htm )



If yes,
2. What are the easiest ways to start contributing? (this is the first 
time I am trying to contribute toward a open source project)


The main page of the OSM wiki

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page

has a section on "how to develop and use the platform" 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Develop .  There are lots of links there.





PS :-
I am third year computer science undergraduate. I have done courses in 
Database Systems, Object Oriented Programming, Data Structure and 
Algorithms. Will I be requiring background in anything else to get 
started?



A couple of other thoughts...

There's a mailing list for "development" stuff over at 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev .  I'd also mention IRC - 
see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IRC - there's a global #osm 
channel on OFTC and also a #osm-dev for development and day to day 
server admin stuff.


The wiki has a "top 10 tasks" list over at 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Tasks .  That's probably 
worth a read.


There's a help site at https://help.openstreetmap.org/ .  That covers 
more than just development stuff, but you may find answers to questions 
there.


There are various test servers, so if you're doing anything with OSM's 
main API please don't write test data to the live server. There's a dev 
API at http://api06.dev.openstreetmap.org/ (among others) that you can 
use for testing.



Finally, I'd make a couple of organisational comments...

OSM isn't really an "organised" project in that there isn't one big 
github repository with everything in it and one main site that everyone 
uses.  You'll probably struggle to find links between stuff.  For 
example, I've linked to the main OSM sites above, but JOSM (one of the 
main OSM editors, written in Java) has its own site over at 
https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ , with its own bug tracker, releases 
etc.  The software used to convert OSM data for use with Garmin 
handhelds is mkgmap, over at http://www.mkgmap.org.uk/ - again, separate 
releases, documentation, mailing list etc.


OSM at its heart is just a big pile of XML data maintained by a 
community of mappers.  It's not really a "computer science" project in 
that sense (though of course lots of software is used by OSM and by 
OSM's users).  Because there are so many contributors, data consumers 
need to constantly think about how to deal with keys and values that 
they might not expect, though 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Elements (and linked pages) should 
describe the XML structure OK.


Best Regards (and good luck),

Andy



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Re: [OSM-talk] Nominatim - Does it use the is_in tag?

[Andy Townsend]

On 16/08/2016 16:19, Hakuch wrote:

following the wiki, its not deprecated

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:is_in


I was surprised when I read that the other day too...


However, I really would love to see a scheme that shows how nominatim
finds it results..


There's the nominatim.openstreetmap.org site (but that might not be want 
you want).


http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details.php?place_id=660625

Doesn't explicitly mention "is_in", but I guess you could try it 
somewhere there are enclaves and exclaves and see what it returns.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Data Quality and Mapping for the renderer.

[Andy Townsend]

On 22/08/2016 12:40, john whelan wrote:
Now the idea of something that picks up a POI such as a shop for 
review every x months is interesting and its not impossible to build a 
suitable tool.  I wonder who I can chat to.


There was a web-based thing that did exactly that (can't remember where, 
and it went away when I last looked).


You could probably do something with 
https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/Notes01 and 
https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/osmimport_02 though.  The former of 
those can extract data from Overpass around a point (currently for 
fixmes, but you could change that to look for other tags) and the latter 
allows you to update a list of "places you need to go and survey" - 
you'd need to change it to work with a list of POIs etc. from overpass 
and update your local list (what osmimport_02 calls its "base_data" 
file) with that.


Although it's something I've thought about looking at, it's not on my 
list to do any time soon though.


Cheers,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] Without an address, an Icelandic tourist drew this map of the intended location (Búðardalur) and surroundings on the envelope. The postal service delivered!

[Andy Townsend]

On 30/08/2016 19:10, Paul Johnson wrote:


I swear to god we've been over this...


Surely the natural conclusion is a "what3osmtalkthreads" - something 
like "your address is 'sidewalks, imports, licensing' ..." :)


Cheers,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] Mailing lists archive not in Google

[Andy Townsend]

On 31/08/2016 17:23, Matthijs Melissen wrote:

Hi,

The mailing list archives at
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/ are currently not indexed
by Google. I suppose this is caused by the  tag that is included in every page of the
archive.


Maybe I'm missing something, but a web search of e.g. "something 
site:https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/"; finds relevant 
posts?  Is there something I'm not understanding here?


Cheers,
Andy


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[OSM-talk] Pronunciation (was: Re: Spoken street names)

[Andy Townsend]

On 22/08/2016 18:21, Štefan Baebler wrote:
Having TTS to hear the street names is very nice, but hearing them 
correctly pronounced would be even better.


There was an attempt at it:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Phonetics

But AFAIK there was no outcome from that proposal.


Slightly more are tagged with 
http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/name%3Apronunciation (but not many).


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Multilingual feedback wanted for OpenStreetMap Carto

[Andy Townsend]

On 19/09/2016 11:13, Paul Norman wrote:


The changes this topic is about are not live on openstreetmap.org. The 
original message has details, but the issue tracking the proposed 
changes is 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/2349, and you 
can see images there that show what the change is.


So perhaps the "huge improvement for the situation in Korea" mentioned 
above is due to the move to Mapnik 3 (which as I understand it has 
happened) rather than a font change?


Cheers,
Andy (SomeoneElse)


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Re: [OSM-talk] New mapper's dubious amendments

[Andy Townsend]

On 19/09/2016 13:01, Dave F wrote:

Hi

This new mapper has peppered the world with a few edits that seem 
unlikely: 


I've commented specifically on 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/42260051 .  If they don't reply 
and keep editing we* can look at taking further action.  If they don't 
reply but don't edit any more then I guess a "revert on the grounds of 
being unlikely" would make sense, though of course local mappers may 
well have got there first.


Best Regards,
Andy


* The Data Working Group


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Re: [OSM-talk] Lot's of locality names in an otherwise empty area

[Andy Townsend]

On 21/11/2016 11:42, Richard Fairhurst wrote:

Sebastian Arcus wrote:

Well, looking at the map, it looks like each and every parcel of
land and section of field has a locality tag associated with it.

It's very common in the UK, too, for uninhabited sections of woodland and
hillside to have placenames.


... and fields, of course.  Where I was brought up the names in use were 
mostly just descriptive ("The Twenty Acre Field", "Piggy Thompson's 
Fields", etc.), but they were in OSM terms at least "loc_names".  Very 
few were verifable beyond "find a local old person and ask them" though.


However "names on a map" doesn't always mean "names of places". Ordnance 
Survey data in the UK is riddled with them, and some are little more 
than historic names.  Anything that's taken OS data on board without 
local vetting will share that problem.  As an example, 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_End,_Derbyshire was originally a 
"village" in wikipedia; it got changed to the curious "a place noted on 
a map" at 
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Common_End,_Derbyshire&diff=next&oldid=302498425 
when various people (including me, who has lived down the road for 30 
years) said "it's not actually a village!".


Obviously names change over time.  In the Common End case I suspect it 
was never much more than a farm, like Owlcotes to the north (another 
"place" according to OS maps).  Another example of that is here:


http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/54.5567/-8.2094

There there's a modern village ("Rossnowlagh") but two townlands 
("Rossnowlagh Upper" http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5625290 and 
"Rossnowlagh Lower" http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5625293).  
Those two were also imported as 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/5224127 and 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/52242180.  The "Upper" and "Lower" 
versions aren't signed on the ground and aren't villages any more 
(though likely once had significant populations); the modern village 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2349484921/history I added based on 
survey, after checking with #osm-ie what best to do.




it still seems a bit odd - and begs the question if those tags
really need to be there.

Why not? Be conservative in what you change/delete in OSM, be liberal in
what you add.


Indeed - but there's no harm in asking the question, and as Colin Smale 
said yesterday, the logical people to ask, if you can't find a local 
80-year-old, are the people that added it.


Cheers,

Andy



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Re: [OSM-talk] This is an auto-generated note from MAPS.ME application:

[Andy Townsend]

On 09/12/2016 11:49, Dave F wrote:

Hi

http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Peter%20Mount/notes

They are all for the same entity.

How can we stop this annoying repetition?


1) Try and contact the user, via changeset discussion comments, note 
updates or similar.


if that doesn't work

2) Send an email to d...@osmfoundation.org requesting a block.  We can 
send them a message that they have to read before continuing mapping.  
If they've used a throwaway email address of have no idea what OSM is, 
then it'll stop their garbage updates.


Note that (1) actually works in a surprisingly large number of cases 
(not the majority, sure, but enough to be worth trying).  Also - it 
helps if you "be nice" when trying to contact new users, especially when 
they don't know what they're doing.


Best Regards,

Andy (DWG member)



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Re: [OSM-talk] This is an auto-generated note from MAPS.ME application:

[Andy Townsend]

On 09/12/2016 12:20, Rory McCann wrote:


How about someone local go there, survey, and possibly remove the node?
If users are providing feedback, maybe someone should look into it,
rather than complain that the user keeps providing feedback.


It's was a "My Local", and certainly isn't now because that chain ceased 
trading earlier this year.


However, I'd suggest that someone (preferably local to the area) tries 
to help the mapper make useful edits to OSM themselves. Clearly this 
person wants to update the map; they just don't know how to do so (and 
the UI of MAPS.ME isn't helping them).  I'd comment on one of the notes 
explaining what OSM is and suggesting that they use the credentials that 
they use for MAPS.ME to login to osm.org on a PC and use the 
browser-based editor there to delete the shop.  Who knows, they might 
see other stuff that needs mapping in that area too...


Map edits suggest that there are quite a few mappers in the Bristol area 
- so who's the friendliest one (to reply on a note)?


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Cleanup of Wiki Page "Contact_channels"

[Andy Townsend]

On 12/12/2016 19:38, Michael Reichert wrote:

The page lists three XMPP channels.

...

Are there any objections against moving the English channel into a
section called "formerly used communication channels"?
I'd actually delete it - the history of the page will be in the wiki 
history.


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Beware Pokemon users

[Andy Townsend]

Well, and apologies if this appears in any way snarky, you appear not to 
have welcomed any Pokemon users, whereas the person that you are 
criticising has (e.g. https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/44637591 )...


OSM really doesn't need people more people telling other people what 
they should be doing.  What it does need is people actually willing to 
help.  If you'd like to see example changeset discussion comments to 
use, there are plenty more in the US (see 
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions?c=United%20States ).  My 
example FWIW (for one that came to the DWG as needing reverting) is on 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/44656368 .


Cheers,

Andy


On 26/12/16 12:14, Andy Mabbett wrote:

On 25 December 2016 at 17:17, Toby Murray  wrote:


Beware Pokemon users

You appear to have accidentally typed "Beware Pokemon users", where
the correct subject would be "Please Welcome Pokemon users".

HTH, and Merry Christmas!




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Re: [OSM-talk] Beware Pokemon users

[Andy Townsend]

Just to pick up one point from this...


On 26/12/16 11:36, Rod Bera wrote:

Systematic bias put into the OSM base towards maximising benefits for a
minority of users is a threat.
Especially when the primary interest of these users is not OSM in itself.


Sounds like I'm bang to rights there!  Most of what I add to OSM 
(footpaths, trees, whether a local pub has a stone floor and a real fire 
etc.) could be exactly described as "maximising benefits for a minority 
of users".  Worse, the local OSMers all seem to be doing the same thing 
- shops, house numbers, a borderline obsession with tunnels, but 
everyone has different ideas of what to do, so that somehow a wide range 
of things are covered.


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Wikipedia/Wikidata admins cleanup

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/01/2017 12:19, Andy Mabbett wrote:

On 4 January 2017 at 10:11, Frederik Ramm  wrote:


Wikidata tags in OSM are already of low quality because of mindless
mass-addition by people with zero local knowledge

Oh, please stop with this FUD.

Unless you have evidence* to support this assertion, you should
apologise to the good people whose hard work has seen many thousands
of Wikidata tags usefully - and automatically - added to OSM.


* not anecdotes.





Do my comments on http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/43749373 count 
as "evidence" or "anecdotes" in your book?  I'm still waiting for the 
issues raised there to be addressed.


FWIW (and this bit is anecdotal - I've not put any numbers together) the 
root cause of the problems I'm seeing local to me seems to be a lack of 
data quality at the wikidata end. Typically, a wikidata article is 
created from a wikipedia article, and that wikipedia article covers more 
than one OSM item.


For example, https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/957808 is Dunham on 
Trent civil parish, and https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1782116865 is 
the village itself.  The civil parish object has a wikidata link to 
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5315240 , but the village does not.  
Unfortunately https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5315240 claims to be a 
village not a civil parish.  It was created from 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Dunham-on-Trent,%20Nottinghamshire 
which claims to be _both_.


You could argue whether the problem occurred at the creation of the 
wikidata item from the wikipedia item, or the linking of the "wrong" OSM 
item to wikidata, but you can't argue that something hasn't gone a bit 
wrong here.


I'd certainly suggest that currently anyone consuming wikidata links in 
OSM data looks very carefully at who added them.  For example, when I 
create Garmin maps (mainly for walking) I try and indicate on them if a 
contributor isn't likely to have actually walked the path in question - 
if I need to get back to a location before it gets dark I might choose a 
path added by someone who's definitely walked down it rather than 
someone who may not have done - maybe wikidata consumers should do 
something similar.


Best Regards,

Andy (SomeoneElse)



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Re: [OSM-talk] Wikipedia/Wikidata admins cleanup

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/01/2017 15:08, Andy Mabbett wrote:

On 4 January 2017 at 13:09, Andy Townsend  wrote:


Do my comments on http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/43749373 count as
"evidence" or "anecdotes" in your book?

It is evidence that /one/ tag is wrong.


To quote from the changeset discussion "... Most of the civil parish 
ones in this changeset look similarly wrong... "


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Wikipedia/Wikidata admins cleanup

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/01/2017 15:36, Andy Mabbett wrote:


Please quantify that; against the total number of Wikidata tags.


214 changes in that changeset; at first glance 82 civil parishes in 
there likely to be in error if they have the "Dunham on Trent" problem - 
about 38%.






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Re: [OSM-talk] Wikipedia/Wikidata admins cleanup

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/01/2017 16:05, Andy Mabbett wrote:

Third time of asking:

would you accept a single random bad tag/changeset on OSM as evidence
that "tags in OSM are already of low quality"?



What's that got to do with the price of fish?

To be clear, this isn't one single changeset.  It's just one example 
that I can comment on in detail because I'm familiar with the things in 
it because they're near me.  I'd expect similar problems wherever this 
wikidata adder also lacks local knowledge, so I'd expect similar issues 
with other changesets further away, and where people have checked, there 
have been some comments - see e.g. 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/44249131 (as yet unanswered).  I 
suspect that the vast majority of these changes are as yet unchecked.


In OSM, we can use the source tag to distinguish how things were 
surveyed - for example, in the UK "source=NPE" means "from an old 
inaccurate out of copyright map".  It made perfect sense to add things 
from that source when there wasn't a better source available, but now 
that there are better sources available it makes sense to remap.


The problem with these wikidata mass-additions is that (other than 
looking at the users adding this stuff) there isn't a way to say "this 
is based on local knowledge" and "this clearly isn't", so it's not easy 
to decide what needs remapping.


Best Regards,

Andy



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Re: [OSM-talk] Wikipedia/Wikidata admins cleanup

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/01/2017 16:43, Yuri Astrakhan wrote:
* I think MapRoulette is actually the tool we should use to fix these 
issues.


Hell no.

Let's consider that when MapRoulette users have fixed all problems with 
the TIGER data in the USA - a task that it is far better suited to.  
MapRoulette's great for asking questions that can be answered solely 
based on imagery, not requiring local knowledge.  This problem is 
exactly the opposite of that.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Wikipedia/Wikidata admins cleanup

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/01/2017 21:01, Andy Mabbett wrote:

On 4 January 2017 at 19:49, Frederik Ramm  wrote:


we can afford to wait until someone who actually knows the area they are
working in has the time to add Wikidata tags.

As has been made clear in other discussions in which you have been
involved, this is already underway.



Is it really?  Near me I've been waiting for 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/43749373 to be fixed since 
mid-November.  The person who commented on 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/44249131 over in the USA has been 
waiting for a month.




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Re: [OSM-talk] Wikipedia/Wikidata admins cleanup

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/01/2017 22:24, Mikel Maron wrote:
Ok I hear you. Let me walk this back a step. Not the same standard, 
but a standard beyond now that gives some visibility to the process. I 
know there is a process of monitoring, analysis, communication and 
action followed by the DWG. Let's document that. And a simple not 
burdensome log of actions - summarizing the above. This visibility 
will improve community understanding of the process, help to spot 
trends, and improve everyone's work overall.


Well if it helps, my answer yesterday to this help question

https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/53812/contested-border-sahrawi-morocco-decision-to-display

explains the process that was followed to try and come up with some kind 
of consensus as to how to display that area in OSM.  However, what 
worked in that case may not be appropriate elsewhere because each case 
is different - in fact the most common response that I give to the DWG 
stuff that I deal with is just to try and get everyone to talk to each 
other more to try and understand other points of view, no other actions 
needed.


Best Regards,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] Wikipedia/Wikidata admins cleanup

[Andy Townsend]

On 05/01/17 12:23, mi...@groundtruth.in wrote:

* Mikel Maron * +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron
... As Frederik said, better reporting and processing can benefit DWG. 
This is something I want to spend time on.


I think that it's important that how we do this sort of thing as a 
project is discussed in whatever public forums are available (and right 
now the "most international" one we have is this talk list, alongside 
the other widely-used international community forums for different 
languages over at forum.osm.org such as the DE and RU forums there).


Your "Reverts should be held to the same standard as imports..." post 
above may have been something of a dog-whistle response to Frederik's 
post, but when I read things that talk about "the current revert regime" 
and say "Reverts should be held to the same standard as imports" and 
"well documented and visible plan" I read it as meaning "I want you to 
stop doing what you are currently doing in the way that you are doing 
it", and want to understand why.


I'd much rather the direction on this came from the community rather 
than the board (and yes, there will obviously be as many different views 
as there are OSM mappers).  If "the communication I've seen from 
community members making reverts has left a lot of rough feelings" then 
let's talk about it (for a start; which particular actions are we 
talking about?  Was the data that was removed added when it shouldn't 
have been (for e.g. license reasons) and are we just talking about the 
tone of the conversation, or something else?


Activities such as https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/44923663 (to 
take an example revert action from me yesterday) are going to become 
more common as more people use OSM.  In this case the sequence of events 
was detect the problem, revert the vandalism, block the user and request 
that an admin delete the account (which was created just for that 
purpose).  I'd argue that those actions (apart from block the user) 
should be able to be carried out by anyone familiar enough with OSM to 
recognise the problem, and we should actually encourage everyone in that 
position to do so - providing that they can recognise the difference 
between obvious vandalism (as happened here) and a business owner unable 
to get the hang of editing and renaming something nearby by mistake.  I 
don't think that "a well documented and visible plan" would help here, 
unless that plan said "if you see something wrong, please take 
appropriate action to fix it" (which I've always thought was the 0th 
rule of OSM anyway).  Anything too bureaucratic would just slow down the 
fixing of problems.


There are lots of interested parties in OSM - all the way from 
individuals like me who 8 years ago were just looking for somewhere to 
store stuff from an old GPS (a route of footpaths and villages across 
Wales, as it happens) up through large non-profit and for-profit 
corporations, all of whom contribute greatly to the OSM ecosystem.  On a 
personal note with the DWG I've found that the large organisations can 
generally look after themselves, and there's a role for standing up for 
the "little guy", whether it's a new mapper in an established community 
or (as in the SADR case upthread) an attempt to remove a country - for 
some definition of country - from the map.  It's important that as a 
community we talk to each other and listen to what everyone else has to 
say, especially when (as in the "wikidata" case) everyone has the best 
interests of the project at heart, just different visions of what those 
best interests are.


Best Regards,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] Destructive new 'contributor'

[Andy Townsend]

On 22/01/17 10:50, Dave F wrote:

Hi

Some one from China has made some meaningless & erroneous edit in 
Bristol, UK which I've reverted, 


For completeness, that was

https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/45364788

Unfortunately your comments there weren't really actionable - they don't 
explain what the contributor was doing wrong, and what they need to do 
better next time.


but there's one in New Orleans which someone with local knowledge 
needs to look at.


https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/45365148#map=11/29.9244/-90.2323

Is there someone here who can repost to Talk-US?


You can, if you subscribe to the list. :)



On side note: Do users of editors like mapswithme receive changeset 
comments?


It depends.  Many users of MAPS.ME just think it is "an app with some 
maps in it" and have no idea what OSM is.  This has been raised with the 
MAPS.ME developers a number of times (see 
https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues ).  If they've signed up with a 
throw-away email address (or generally "don't read email"), they won't 
see it.


Separately to this, a lot of people are spending a lot of time trying to 
communicate with MAPS.ME users - and in some cases succeeding (though 
the response rate seems lower to me than with other mappers).  If 
communication fails then drop a mail to d...@osmfoundation.org so that 
we can apply a 0-hour block on the account - force them to read a 
message before continuing mapping (but not actually stopping them from 
mapping - they can edit again as soon as they've read the message).  
This is useful when people have e.g. used a throw-away email account to 
sign up to an online service.  However, it's important to have explained 
mapping problems in changeset discussion first, since we'll inevitably 
refer back to previous discussions for a particular mapper such as 
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussion-comments?uid=5167736 here.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Untagged Nodes and Ways

[Andy Townsend]

On 28/01/2017 22:55, Clifford Snow wrote:


iD issue 3806 [2] requested that untagged ways would prevent the user 
from uploading a changeset. Bryan thought it is fine for user to add 
an untagged way for someone else to fix. I see his point that they may 
get discouraged and not continue to contribute to OSM.


Turning that around, can you suggest a way of communicating the fact 
that this is a problem to the user using terms that they'd understand?  
I'd find it difficult to do that.


I fairly regularly talk to new mappers about untagged ways and 
"area=yes" ways (which are the more common example) and have the "if you 
want renderers and routers to know what something is, you need to do 
more than give it a name" conversation.  It'd be impossible to do that 
if they weren't allowed to upload in the first place.


Also, let's be honest - untagged ways aren't a "problem" in any other 
sense other than disk space.  They won't confuse renderers or routers.  
If there are too many in a given area they might confuse other mappers, 
but these other mappers are perfectly free to delete them if they can't 
figure out what they were supposed to be.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Untagged Nodes and Ways

[Andy Townsend]

On 29/01/2017 00:17, john whelan wrote:
I'm wandering through Africa at the moment basically tagging untagged 
ways and area=yes.  I think I've corrected several thousand but 
something that I've just hit are boxes tagged hires=yes or no.


Those I think are referring to where there was Bing high resolution 
imagery and where there wasn't.  I've never been convinced that things 
like that belong in OSM in the first place (though others may disagree) 
- you'll probably be able to find some previous list discussion if you 
go back far enough.


Cheers,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] Quality in rural areas (Was: [Analytics] February 15, 2017 Research Showcase)

[Andy Townsend]

On 15/02/2017 13:29, Jean-Marc Liotier wrote:

Node density, adjusted for population density, 2014:
https://i.imgur.com/hBNEGNT.png (found at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7958598) - I would love to see
that updated. Variance seems higher in low population area. Would edit
density or tag density be better indicators than node density ?


Personally, I suspect that both would be better than raw node density.  
What'd also be interesting would be to exclude things that have been 
imported and just left there (or maybe just exclude v1 of everything?).


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Fixing broken multipolygons

[Andy Townsend]

On 18/02/2017 10:15, Florian Lohoff wrote:


After Europe was fixed in <24h it seems i started to wade through Africa
and i am seeing some error class which makes me wonder is somebody did
some large scale autonomous Aerial scan for buildings.

There are literally hundrets of building which have 4 edges as nodes
but them beeing connected over cross so that a construct like a
butterfly resembles.


Any chance of a link to an example?

Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Spam reporting

[Andy Townsend]

On 23/02/2017 08:56, joost schouppe wrote:


Well the annoyance with spam does pop up often enough. The usual 
answer to things like this in the OSM ecosystem is "why don't you do 
it yourself". I've not seen this answer for spam. Is there no easy way 
for people to become spam-police if they like to do so?


I normally mention it in #osm-dev on IRC, but to be honest most spam 
gets deleted pretty quickly anyway.


Best Regards,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] Call from OSGeo members to discussion about OSM and synergies

[Andy Townsend]

On 03/03/2017 10:21, Benoit Fournier wrote:

Hello OSM community,

Please find a call from Suchith Anand (OSGeo/FOSS4G/Geo4All,
University of Nottingham UK).

...
Please do get in touch if you want to get involved.


There's an active OSM group in Nottingham (including me); he's welcome 
come along to the next meeting and discuss things (current scheduled for 
21st March, though check 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nottingham/Pub_Meetup for updates).


The attached message snippet appears not to have any contact 
information; if he wants to contact me my email's in this message and 
the usual OSM mechanisms will also work - OSM messages or IRC (#osm-gb 
on oftc), and of course he can sign up to and post to this list.


Best Regards,

Andy ("SomeoneElse" in OSM)


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Re: [OSM-talk] Changing Bing to bing

[Andy Townsend]

On 06/03/2017 07:32, Werner Poppele wrote:


before uploading data to OSM, JOSM showed an error / warning message 
about the "suspect" writing of "Bing". That was the reason for 
changing "Bing" to "bing". 


Hi Werner,

I'm guessing that the context of this message is changeset discussion 
comments such as on here:


https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/46520040

I think its worth making a couple of points:

1) If JOSM is really recommending that you change "source=Bing" to 
"source=bing" or vice versa then I'd suggest that you ignore it. With 
both "Bing" and "bing" it's pretty obvious what the source is and not 
worth "editing" lots of objects to change it.  I'd also suggest that 
whatever it is in JOSM that's recommending this be changed so as not 
to.  A couple of times in the past I've suggested that JOSM's rules be 
relaxed in this way and I've always found the JOSM developers to be 
extremely helpful with this sort of issue.


2) The fact that you're replying here suggests that you might be trying 
to reply to a changeset discussion; so it's perhaps worth explaining 
what's happening how those work.


When someone adds a comment to the discussion on a changeset, you'll get 
an email about it.  Unlike with OSM mapper-to-mapper messages, you can't 
just reply and have that reply go back to the person who sent it.  You 
need to click on the link in the message that takes you to the changeset 
and login to OSM (if you're not already).  Then you can type your 
comments in the text box and click "comment" which will add your comment 
to the discussion.


You can use one of Pascal Neis' tools to see who's commented on your 
changesets if you know your userid; the example for mine would be 
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussion-comments?uid=61942 .


Best Regards,

Andy

PS: Obviously I'm assuming that you're the same Werner that made that 
"Bing" change in Ireland; my apologies if I'm getting confused by 
different people called Werner editing using the Bing imagery as a 
background.




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Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Andy Townsend]

Just to add one more comment to what has been a very useful thread 
discussing the options available:


At no time did anyone see fit to actually try and get in touch with the 
user who made these edits explaining what OSM is and trying to win them 
over from "mapping for Pokemon" to mapping things that actually exist.


Surely that's got to be worth a try, rather than proposing (as some have 
here) some sort of "technical solution"?  A quick scan of 
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions suggests that there are 
quite a lot of people doing exactly that - lots of "Bonjour bienvenue 
sur OpenStreetMap" there.  I know that it's frustrating writing that 
over and over again, but there have certainly been examples on talk-us 
and the reddit threads of people who have "crossed over".


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] multipolygon source tags preferred method

[Andy Townsend]

On 27/03/2017 09:41, Jochen Topf wrote:


Putting the sources on the objects has been deprecated for a while.


Ahem.  Just because _you_ don't do it, doesn't make it "wrong".

Yes, where a whole bunch of stuff has been added from one source (or a 
combination of sources), of course it makes sense to do that on the 
changeset not on individual objects (and editors that show a 
consolidated object history will show source tags from all of these).


However, there may be cases - imagine a road junction that you've 
visited that has changed since the available imagery - where a source 
tag on objects may make sense.  Also, splitting into different 
changesets per source tag sounds like a silly idea...


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Multi Polygon problem - could someone take a look?

[Andy Townsend]

On 02/04/2017 11:29, Dave F wrote:
Move a node & the way's vector is amended. Common sense tells you that 
the polygon has changed & needs to be listed as such. It appears that 
the data takes priority over the needs of the contributors. This can't 
be correct. 


When in JOSM, I've sometimes used shift-control-h to get to the website, 
and edited in Potlatch 2 from there.


Maybe we should ask the JOSM maintainers to add an "open in Potlatch 2" 
option to allow the full history to be seen :)


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Looking for "primary language" map

[Andy Townsend]

On 11/04/2017 00:55, James wrote:
Also have you checked: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_official_languages_by_country_and_territory


A bit offtopic, but it's worth mentioning that that is exactly what it 
says it is - a list of "oficial languages", not what language is 
actually spoken in a place.  OSM's "on the ground rule" favours the 
latter over the former.  The entry in that table isn't quite correct for 
the country that I am most familiar with (the UK - it suggests that the 
recognition of minority languages in NI is similar to e.g. Cornwall, 
which ignores some of the terms of the Good Friday Agreement), so I'd 
take it with a pinch of salt elsewhere too.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Tagging and rendering of television masts

[Andy Townsend]

On 21/04/2017 22:56, Andy Mabbett wrote:

the Sutton Coldfield (England) TV mast:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton_Coldfield_transmitting_station

at:


http://www.opensntreetmap.org/?mlat=37.08321&mlon=-8.13643#map=17/37.0832/-8.1364


That's the one in Portugal, I think?

Sutton Coldfield is at:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/6044107

The discussion about how to render things like this in the standard 
style is at 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/339 (and 
probably other places).


The current tagging (man_made=tower; tower:type=communication) looks OK 
to me.  An alternative might be to do as per Lichfield 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1258302194 
(man_made=communications_tower), which the "standard" style also doesn't 
render.


I currently show them as e.g. 
https://map.atownsend.org.uk/maps/map/map.html#zoom=18&lat=52.600125&lon=-1.833634 
(with a name as well).  One thing that I had given a bit of thought to 
was to have _very_ tall towers appear at lower zoom levels.  It'd 
involve doing a bit of maths in the lua tag transform script, which is 
surely possible, but not something that I've not looked at at all - and 
for Sutton Coldfield it'd need the height tagging as well.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Tagging and rendering of television masts

[Andy Townsend]

On 22/04/2017 07:33, Oleksiy Muzalyev wrote:


It is possible to map it as: "man_made=mast", "height=190", etc., then 
it will be rendered.


In the general case, please don't suggest that people mistag things just 
so that one particular renderer (one that probably isn't used by the 
majority of people that consume OSM data*) renders it.


However in this particular case I can't claim to be familiar enough with 
it to say whether 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:man_made%3Dtower or 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:man_made%3Dmast is more 
appropropriate, or indeed whether those wiki pages reflect OSM usage.


Best Regards,

Andy

* I'm guessing the "most views" accolade goes to either Mapbox Streets 
or MAPS.ME these days.


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Re: [OSM-talk] Tagging and rendering of television masts

[Andy Townsend]

On 25/04/2017 13:51, Greg Troxel wrote:


However, if one renders and one doesn't, in the default style, that's a
bug, and presumably someone can make a pull request to fix it - it seems
obviously uncontroversial.


You'd have thought so, but a project maintainer closed exactly that 
issue at https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/181 
back in 2014.  Unfortunately it's not the only example where the 
"standard" map takes "unusual" rendering decisions.  Put bluntly, if it 
doesn't work for you, use a different map.  Personally, I gave up using 
it about 3 years ago because it was no longer fit for purpose, at least 
for me.


Best Regards,

Andy



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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM Note 1000000

[Andy Townsend]

On 26/05/2017 11:31, Jean-Marc Liotier wrote:

Why doesn't damn MAPS.ME produce those bloody notes with the name of
the place instead of "The place" ? That way they could be useful
instead of being a nuisance.


I've just added https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/6136 saying 
exactly that.




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Re: [OSM-talk] Street Complete

[Andy Townsend]

On 03/06/2017 06:48, Sebastiaan Couwenberg wrote:

Ranting on the Internet does not make software better, providing
constructive feedback via the appropriate channel (i.e. project issue
tracker) does.


Indeed, but sometimes it's appropriate to give a "community heads-up".  
I'd certainly not seen the notes issue raised elsewhere, so it was 
useful for me to see this thread.


Also discussing with the wider community is sometimes the only way to 
get a change to happen.  StreetComplete originally had "1 change per 
changeset", and the timeline of that issue is interesting:


21st March:  Issue 
https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete/issues/21 created. 
Maintainer initially asks why it is a problem.


30th March: Forum thread 
https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=57855 created


7th April: Maintainer announces fix to problem (initially in forum 
rather than on Github).


So in this case it does seem to be the German forum thread that resulted 
in the fix - and the thread title ("StreetComplete - die nächste 
suboptimale App") could even be described as "ranting", too.




Ah yes, your lovely deprecated editor which still lets users create
old-style multipolygons on a daily basis. How I love your work.

See the irony in the above?



Well if you're going to be offensive, at least try and be accurate :)

Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] "NRCS basic OSM training" - low quality changesets in Nepal

[Andy Townsend]

On 18/06/2017 22:42, Andrew Hain wrote:

Have you tried politely making changeset comments asking this?


(just in case anyone's unaware that it exists)

http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions?c=Nepal#8/27.529/86.310

shows this week's changeset discussion comments centred on Nepal.

Best Regards,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] Highway=trunk : harmonization between countries ?

[Andy Townsend]

On 24/08/2017 11:49, Richard wrote:


it would become an OSM problem if someone decides to tag this road
with maxspeed:practical=60. A router may then decide to route you
to this route instead of some alternative that would be much faster
for people who decide to respect speed limits at schools.


If a router uses a higher maxspeed:practical in preference to a lower 
maxspeed log a bug with it :)



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Re: [OSM-talk] Highway=trunk : harmonization between countries ?

[Andy Townsend]

On 24/08/2017 14:18, Lester Caine wrote:


The starting point is the raw data in OSM ... but when something does
not look right in using that data just where do you start? I know my own
problems are mainly how the data is used and if I had more time I would
look to adjust the assumptions to give a more realistic 'fastest' route
for UK rural areas


No idea what router you're using, but a common-or-garden Garmin satnav 
using OSM data is pretty much bang on timing-wise for rural routing 
around here.



  - and get my blue motorway, green trunk and red
primary road back :)

I don't think we're actually short of map tiles with those colours :)  
The UK/IE ones that I create are like that, and many others are too - 
either styles not updated since 2014 or deliberately chosen to look that 
way.


Best Regards,

Andy



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Re: [OSM-talk] Wheelchair accessibility

[Andy Townsend]

On 21/09/2017 13:19, Clifford Snow wrote:
... which makes it difficult for some people in wheelchairs to access. 
Even though the requirement is there, I would probably mark it as 
inaccessible.


Funnily enough, someone at a recent OSM East Mids meetup mentioned 
exactly that sort of issue - specifically the width of some wheelchairs 
and the difficulty navigating the entrance / exit (not someone _at_ the 
meetup, just someone who happened to be in the same room of the pub).  
I'm pretty sure that I'd struggle to tell whether a bus was "actually 
accessible" or not until I'd actually tried it with a wheelchair.


Other examples of this sort of thing that I'm aware of are a 
barrier/bend in the path combination (1) that is probably doable in most 
wheelchairs but not on a mobility scooter (the problem there is not the 
width of the barrier but that combined with the location) and a crossing 
of a busy road (2) which is likely impassable to both most of the time 
because of the volume of traffic.  I've refrained from adding wheelchair 
tags to either because I don't think I'm best placed to make the 
necessary value judgement about it.


Cheers,

Andy


1) http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/54.01163/-1.05798
2) http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/54.00467/-1.05569

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Re: [OSM-talk] Label language on the Default stylesheet

[Andy Townsend]

On 25/09/2017 14:53, Oleksiy Muzalyev wrote:


If not Latin, then why English? Why not French?

Well _obviously_ the answer is Esperanto.  There are a few Esperanto 
enthusiasts adding names to OSM (see e.g. 
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/name%3Aeo and 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/157076265 ).  I'm surprised that one 
of them hasn't popped up in this thread already.


While we're at it can we change the default tagging language to German 
so that we can be a bit more precise about everything?


Best Regards,

Andy (not entirely seriously)


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Re: [OSM-talk] Adding wikidata tags to the remaining objects with only wikipedia tag

[Andy Townsend]

On 26/09/2017 03:40, Yuri Astrakhan wrote:

... I have been blocked by Andy Townsend with the following message.

Let's begin at the beginning - this was a "0-hour block" - you weren't 
prevented from using the API for _any_ period of time, merely forced to 
read this message first.  This was a last resort - many other attempts 
at communication have been made over at least the last 10 months (since 
November 2016 - https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/43749373 ).  The 
issues that I raised back then are still true today - see 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2017-September/078780.html 
for more details.  It makes no sense to mechanically copy a wikidata 
value to OSM when the wikidata object expresses only part of the sense 
of the wikipedia page.


Simple example in case things are still not clear:

1) Imagine there are two objects in OSM - a village and an admin area 
containing that village.

2) Wikipedia only has one page for a "village and an admin area"
3) The wikidata page (probably created by a bot) is only for the village
4) Linking the OSM admin area to the wikidata page for the village is an 
error.


This is the sort of thing that you've been doing again and again for the 
last 10 months.


A few interesting semi-relevant statistics so far:  the number of 
discovered links to disambig pages is now back to over 800, even 
without 100k+ untaged ways. And there are almost 38,000 osm objects 
where wikipedia tag does not correspond with wikidata tag. The number 
is very high, but fixing them should be semi-automated, as most of 
them are redirects. TBD.


There are a lots of possibilities here.  Maybe the OSM object shouldn't 
have a wikipedia entry at all.  Maybe it's significantly changed since 
the link was added, and should be changed.  It needs someone with 
real-world knowledge of the OSM object to update the links - anything 
else is just guessing, and has no place in OSM.


If by "semi-automated" you mean a human-centric approach like Kort, 
MapRoulette, StreetComplete et al then fine - but that's not been your 
approach so far.




Here's Andy's message, with my inlined replies. I think that almost 
all of the raised points have been raised and answered in our previous 
discussion, but I feel it is my responsibility to present them again.


You're conducting an import of known bad data (your own changeset
comments say "Further cleanup will be done using...").


Per previous description, the existing data is already bad, and I am 
simply making it possible to identify it, after discussing it on this 
thread.
No, that is untrue.  See e.g. 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/52002597 .





You are wilfully ignoring the feedback that you're receiving now
and have received in the past. A lot of issues have been raised
about the quality of your edits - see
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussion-comments?uid=339581
. In many cases you seem to agree that you're adding rubbish, and
yet you continue.

You seem to be suggesting (in
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2017-September/078767.html
) that "the community" clean up your mess. This is not the way
that OpenStreetMap works - if an individual is adding data to it
(especially large quantities of data) then it is their
responsibility to ensure that the data that they are adding is
valid, or at least as valid as the data that is already there.


Again, no, I am identifying rubbish, not introducing it, and I am very 
actively replying to every comment I receive.
You are not actually _resolving_ any of the problems that people are 
finding with the edits that you are making.  See for example 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/52341792 .  In that example 
someone says that you added a wikidata tag in error.  You agree that you 
added it in error (and in fact a whole category of the tags that you've 
added is in error - I've commented on a couple more within the last 
hour).  You have not done anything to resolve this error that you have 
introduced into OSM .


Going further back, in your replies to changeset comments you've said 
things like "I have already stopped changing any objects except the 
admin levels regions 1-6" https://openstreetmap.org/changeset/4377 
but have carried on regardless.  Mappers have repeatedly asked you to 
use geographically smaller changesets 
https://openstreetmap.org/changeset/44078387**https://openstreetmap.org/changeset/44090685 
https://openstreetmap.org/changeset/44203236 and yet you continue 
regardless.


Either you're incompetent in the changes you're making or you're lying 
to us; in neither case should you be continuing to edit as you have been 
doing.


... The way to solve the quality of this data is to analyze it with 
the OSM+Wikidata 

[OSM-talk] Overlapping brands (was "Fixing wiki* -> brand:wiki*")

[Andy Townsend]

On 27/09/2017 15:35, John F. Eldredge wrote:
The spatial information will tell you where each business location is; 
it is not sufficient to tell you whether these are multiple locations 
of the same brand, or two unrelated brands that share the same name 
and category of business.


Can anyone think of an example where two unrelated brands share the same 
name and category of business in the same geographical area?


The nearest I can think of in the UK is "Wilco Motorsave" and "Wilko" 
(some overlap of what they sell, but different spelling, and typically a 
different "shop" tag in OSM).  In Germany both Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud 
operate, but these tend to be tagged in OSM as operator rather than 
brand, and the only wikidata example I can find is 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/25716765 (via 
http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/s10 , http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/s0Z didn't 
return anything).


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Overlapping brands (was "Fixing wiki* -> brand:wiki*")

[Andy Townsend]

On 27/09/2017 19:47, Marc Gemis wrote:


Is "the same geographical area" relevant ? Why should a data consumer
use a separate datebase to identify the brand of an item ?


Simply because some people had suggested that "brand:wikidata" was 
unnecessary because you could always work out what brand a name was by 
location, and some people had suggested that it was necessary because 
you couldn't - it was just an attempt to find a concrete example; not an 
attempt to prove a point either way.


Of course this is unrelated to whether or not wikidata/wikipedia/any 
other foreign key belongs in OSM (as discussed at length elsewhere).


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Adding wikidata tags to the remaining objects with only wikipedia tag

[Andy Townsend]

On 26/09/2017 18:08, Yuri Astrakhan wrote:



  When data consumers want to get a link to corresponding wikipedia
article, doing that with wikipedia[:xx] tags is straightforward. Doing
the same with wikidata requires additional pointless and time
consuming abrakadabra.


no, you clearly haven't worked with any data consumers recently. Data 
consumers want Wikidata, much more than wikipedia tags - please talk 
to them.


That would be me in a former job, I think.

One of the things that I used to spend a lot of time doing was finding 
ways to encode data so that knowledge could be shared by e.g. field 
engineers, and then analysing those results so that you can find out 
what was related to what, what caused what, and how much store you can 
set by a particular result or prediction.  There are a couple of points 
worth sharing from that experience:


1) The first point to make about human-contributed data is that it's 
variable.  Some people will say something is probably an X, some people 
probably a Y.  The reality is that they're actually both right some of 
the time.  You might think (in the context of e.g. shop brands) "hang on 
- surely a shop can be only one brand?  It must be _either_ X or Y!" but 
you'd be wrong.  There are _always_ exceptions, and there will always be 
"errors" - you just don't know which way is right and which wrong.


2) The second point that's relevant here is that codes such as CODE1, 
CODE2 etc. are to be avoided at all costs since they don't enable any 
natural visualisation of what's been captured.  You have already said 
"but surely every system that displays data can look up the description" 
but anyone familar with the real world knows that that simply won't 
happen.  This means that there's no way for an ordinary mapper to verify 
whether the magic code on an OSM item is correct or not.  Verifiability 
is one of the key concepts of OSM (see 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Verifiability et al) and anything 
that moves away from it means that data isn't going to be maintained, 
because people simply won't understand what it means.  I suspect that a 
key part of the success of OSM was the reliance on natural 
language-based keys and values, and a loose tagging scheme that allowed 
easy expansion.


3) The third point is that a database that has been "cleaned" so that 
there are no "errors" in it is worth far less than one that hasn't, when 
you're trying to understand the complex relationships between objects.  
This goes against most normal data processing instincts because 
obviously normally you'd try and ensure that data has full referential 
integrity - but where there are edge cases (and as per (1) above there 
are always edge cases) different consumers will very likely want to 
treat those edge cases differently, which they can't do if someone has 
"helpfully" merged all the edge cases into more popular categories.



To be blunt, if I was trying to process OSM data and had a need to get 
into the wikidata/wikipedia world based on it (for example because I 
wanted the municipal coat of arms - something not in OSM) I'd take a 
wikipedia link over a wikidata one every time because all mappers will 
have been able to see the text of the wikipedia link rather than just 
something like Q123456.  You've made the point that things change in 
wikipedia regularly (articles get renamed etc.), but it's important to 
remember that things change in the real world all the time as well - and 
a link that's suddenly pointing at something different in wikipedia is 
immediately apparent, in the same way that if Q123456 was no longer 
relevant (because the real world thing has changed) it wouldn't be.


All that said, I don't see wikidata as a key component (or even a very 
useful component) of OSM - but we all map things that are of interest to 
us - some people map in great detail the style of British telephone 
boxes or the "Royal Cipher" on postboxes which I see absolutely no point 
in, but if it's verifiable, why not - I'm sure I'm mapping stuff that is 
irrelevent to them.  A problem with wikidata (as noted above) is that 
I'm not sure that it _is_ verifiable data - I suspect it'll get stale 
after adding and never be maintained, simply because people will never 
notice that it's wrong.


(and on an unrelated comment in the same message)



Sure, it can be via dump parsing, but it is a much more complicated 
than querying.  Would you rather use Overpass turbo to do a quick 
search for some weird thing that you noticed, or download and parse 
the dump?  Most people would rather do the former.


It depends - if you want to do a "quick search for something" then an 
equivalent to overpass turbo might be an option, but in the real world 
what you'd _actually_ want to do is a local database query. 
Unfortunately that side of things seems to be completely missing (or at 
least very well-hidden) - wikidata seems to be quite immature in that 
respect.   Where's the

[OSM-talk] Links from wiki* back into OSM (was: Overlapping brands)

[Andy Townsend]

On 28/09/2017 09:28, Jo wrote:


All OSM objects with a name (in several languages) referring to a city.
More zoomed in:
http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/s20

... except that it isn't necessarily "all objects" - it's "a list of 
objects in OSM manually curated by you".  You're still going to have to 
monitor changes to those objects and look for new instances of "objects 
named after Leuven" in the real world and newly added to OSM.  You 
happen to be using a "name:etymology:wikidata" key in OSM to do this, 
but frankly you could keep that list anywhere - it doesn't depend on 
"etymology" wikidata tags in OSM.  Many mappers (especially those with a 
first language that doesn't use many Greek roots) will I suspect 
struggle with what "name:etymology:wikidata" actually means.


I'd have thought that this sort of "extra non-geographical information" 
was better held outside of OSM, and then link back into OSM via e.g. 
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/wikidata=Q118958 or even 
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/wikipedia=nl%3ALeuven .


I'm not saying that it isn't a great project - it's exactly the sort of 
thing that many OSMers do for many different sorts of data.  I'm just 
not convinced that it depends on the ability to create more and more 
unverifiable keys within OSM.


Best Regards,
Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Links from wiki* back into OSM

[Andy Townsend]

On 28/09/2017 10:36, Marc Gemis wrote:

Andy are you now saying that it is OK to have 1 wikidata tag on each
street, so someone can create an external list of streets with
Wikidata ids to represent some kind of collection (like "all streets
named after Leuven") ?
Firstly I'm not saying "what is or is not OK" - that's essentially the 
point of this discussion, to find out what people do think.


What I'm saying is that the expression of that sort of relationship 
possibly doesn't belong in OSM itself (because it's not really 
on-the-ground verifiable, or at least in many cases it won't be).


If a street passed whatever tests wikipedia impose to have a wikipedia 
entry, and by inference a wikidata one (wikidata items essentially being 
all created from wikipedia, with links added later) then yes, by all 
means add a wikipedia/wikidata link to the OSM object, then add your 
"etymology" link within wikidata.


Obviously wikipedia/wikidata's rules for inclusion are very different to 
ours (in some cases the opposite - wikipedia says "no original research 
- please copy from some other source").  There are plenty of examples of 
things that people think should be in wikipedia and aren't, and also 
things that shouldn't be in wikipedia/wikidata (because they don't 
exist) and are.


Best Regards,
Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Links from wiki* back into OSM

[Andy Townsend]

On 28/09/2017 11:13, Andy Mabbett wrote:

On 28 September 2017 at 09:53, Andy Townsend  wrote:


"objects named after Leuven"
I'd have thought that this sort of "extra non-geographical information" was
better held outside of OSM, and then link back into OSM via e.g.
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/wikidata=Q118958 or even
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/wikipedia=nl%3ALeuven

Objects named after Leuven MUST NOT be tagged "wikidata=Q118958", nor
"wikipedia=:Leuven"

Indeed, and I'm not suggesting that they should be.  Please read what I 
said (at least once before posting).





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Re: [OSM-talk] Fixing wiki* -> brand:wiki*

[Andy Townsend]

On 27/09/2017 17:14, Yuri Astrakhan wrote:
* Problem #1:  In my analysis of OSM data, wikipedia tags quickly go 
stale because they use Wikipedia page titles, and titles are 
constantly renamed, deleted, and what's worse - old names are reused 
for new meanings.  This is a fundamental problem with all Wikipedia 
tags, such as wikipedia, brand:wikipedia, operator:wikipedia, etc, 
that needs solving. The solution does not need to be perfect, it just 
needs to be better than what we have.


* Problem #2: the *meaning* of the "wikipedia" tag is ambiguous, and 
therefor cannot be processed easily. The top three meanings I have 
seen are:
  a) This WP article is about this OSM feature (a so called 1:1 match, 
e.g. city, famous building, ...)
  b) This WP article is about some aspect of this OSM feature, like 
its brand, tree species, or subject of the sculpture
  c) Only a part of this WP article is about this OSM feature, e.g. a 
WP list of museums in the area contains description of this museum.


* Problem #3: data consumers need cleaner, more machine-processable 
data. The text label is much more error prone than an ID:  McDonalds 
vs mcdonalds vs McDonald's vs ..., so having "brand=mcdonalds" results 
in many errors. Note that just because OSM default map skin may handle 
some of them correctly, each data consumer has to re-implement that 
logic, so the more ambiguous something is, the more likely it will 
result in errors and data omissions.


The brand:wikidata discussion is about #1, #2b, and #3.

Are we in agreement that these are problems, or do you think none of 
them need solving?


1)  Not a problem as such.  If something has changed on the wikipedia 
side then something may need checking on the OSM side.  It might be as 
simple as "someone's just renamed the wikipedia page" then fine just fix 
the link - but it needs a human to check it. What might have happened of 
course is that the object has changed in the real world (been renamed, 
moved, or changed in some other way) and the object in OSM needs a 
resurvey, or perhaps can be changed based on existing knowledge, but 
either way it still needs checking.


2b) If someone's added a wikipedia link to an OSM object that represents 
a tree to point to the wikipedia page of that type of tree, than that's 
not helpful.  There's no need for the link, since the tree type is 
already tagged in OSM.


3) This depends on the data consumer.  If you're simply trying to 
impress people with the volume of data that you have access to then you 
might indeed want an a large number of unmaintainable extra links of 
dubious provenance.  Realistically though in my experience (as I've 
written elsewhere in this thread) data consumers do care about the 
quality of the data that they're processing, and the fact that the 
person adding the object spelt "McDonald's" differently is something 
that they may well have a view about.


In a different context I've written elsewhere about the work that went 
in to create the list at 
https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/SomeoneElse-style/blob/master/style.lua#L1401 
which involved looking at how people tagged certain sorts of features in 
OSM.  Free tagging is both a strength and a weakness of OSM - without it 
the data wouldn't get captured at all, but with it people do have to 
look at the data that's been added - but it's what data consumers do 
already.  You could argue that a "brand:wikidata" key makes their job 
easier, but if they want to do a proper job it probably doesn't make a 
lot of difference.


Another example - I recently looked at the usage of "natural=fell" in 
OSM with a view to rendering it.  It surprised me that this query 
http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/s2q showed at least 3 different types of 
objects with the same OSM tag.  A data consumer can't assume that what 
they thought that something meant (perhaps after reading the OSM wiki) 
is what mappers actually do - they'll need to filter the data they're 
consuming based on actual OSM usage.  In the case of "brand:wikidata" 
they may want to filter out obviously bot-added values because there was 
no local knowledge of that data and go back to what other tags the 
mappers added (in the case of the Aldis discussed elsewhere I suspect 
that there will always enough info to say which is which in other tags 
or using geographic location).


Best Regards,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] Adding wikidata tags to the remaining objects with only wikipedia tag

[Andy Townsend]

On 28/09/2017 07:15, Stefano wrote:



We used this library to process the dump and then we add the results 
in pgsql


https://www.entropywins.wtf/blog/2015/11/08/wikidata-wikibase-json-dump-reader/

https://github.com/osmItalia/wikidata-geo-match

What would the requirement of a wikidata2pgsql be?


Thanks for that.

To answer the question, It'd create a database in a format that's 
designed to be queried that contains "just enough" information to 
support whatever job it's needed for (and it'd be great if it also 
supported dynamic column creation using a mechanism similar to 
osm2pgsql's ".style" file).


Of the other "missing bits", I used "osmosis" as an example of "cutting 
a database extract down to size" (other options are available).  In the 
OSM world that initial slice is often geographical, but osmosis can also 
deal with data without explicit co-ordinates (ways and relations) based 
on the geographical location of constituent nodes.  The same would be 
true (for me) of wikidata - I'd be only interested in actual physical 
locations and the things that they link to (which may not have physical 
locations and may just be concepts).


Finally "switch2osm" is a regularly-updated set of instructions that you 
can follow from start to finish without needed external knowledge about 
how to solve a problem.  For example, 
https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04-2-lts/ has 
undergone numerous updates in the last year to deal with stylesheet 
changes, which depend on a bleeding edge version of carto, which depends 
on  node.js.  At each stage in the process the idea was that 
you'd always be able to get a working result, even if at one point that 
meant the instructions explained how get a version of the stylesheet 
from a few months ago because a newer version wouldn't work in 
combination with everything else there.


"wikidata-wikibase-json-dump-reader" looks interesting - it looks (to 
continue the analogy) to be somewhat equivalent to the Crosby PBF library.


"wikidata-geo-match" also looks interesting because 
https://github.com/osmItalia/wikidata-geo-match/blob/master/scripts/2_process.sh 
and the readme explain how to do the initial geographical selection.  
It's not quite all there though 
(https://github.com/osmItalia/wikidata-geo-match/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=0_create_wikidata_table.sql&type= 
suggests either the README is out of date or some bits are missing).  
It'd certainly be a useful start for someone who cared about wikidata to 
develop something mirroring the equivalent tools that OSM already has, 
and I'm sure it does exactly what you need it to do, but it's not a 
generic "let's create a database and allow you to do something with it".


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Adding wikidata tags to the remaining objects with only wikipedia tag

[Andy Townsend]

On 01/10/2017 13:05, Andy Mabbett wrote:


And now you're making things up.


just two posts earlier in this thread you said

> I don't think this kind of sarcastic hyperbole helps to move things
> forward, nor to engender an atmosphere of collegial collaboration.
> Please resist the temptation to use it.

I would respectfully suggest that you follow your own advice.

There's a valid discussion to be had about "how OSM does things vs how 
wikipedia/wikidata does things".  Back in 2016 in another context I 
mentioned "Common End" in Derbyshire on this list 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2016-November/077139.html 
.  It's in wikipedia as "a place noted on a map" (which is correct - OS 
maps include it).  It doesn't in any verifiable sense "exist" though.  
Wikidata has it https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5153341 as both a 
"hamlet" and a "fictional location".  Whether that's "correct" or not is 
a decision for wikidata - I've no idea what their definition of "hamlet" 
is and whether it includes a locality that probably used to exist in 
some sense but all on-the-ground trace of the name has disappeared, but 
it's entirely reasonable to discuss the areas in which different 
contribution customs will result in different data, and how we handle 
links in those cases.


Best Regards,

Andy




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[OSM-talk] Licence compatibility (was Adding wikidata tags to the remaining objects with only wikipedia tag)

[Andy Townsend]

On 02/10/2017 02:56, Paul Norman wrote:

On 10/1/2017 5:39 PM, Yuri Astrakhan wrote:
Lastly, if the coordinates are different, you may not copy it from 
OSM to Wikidata because of the difference in the license.


Just for clarity and anyone reading the archives later, copying from 
Wikidata to OSM is also a problem because Wikidata permits coordinate 
sources like Wikipedia or Google Earth.


_
Would a data consumer be able to legally combine OSM and 
wikipedia/wikidata data in any meaningful way, given this fundamental 
licence incompatibility?  What requirements would they have to fulfil 
with their combined data?  The OSM side of things is discussed in some 
detail at 
http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Licence_and_Legal_FAQ , but 
what about requirements due to other data in there?


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Could we just pause any wikidata edits for a month or two?

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/10/2017 18:56, Stefan Keller wrote:

(questions from Yuri snipped)
Anyone?


To be honest, that just struck me as more "whataboutery" designed to 
divert attention from the suggestion at the top of this thread:


> pause any (large scale) wikidata edits for a while until more members 
of our community have had a

> chance to form an opinion

Yuri has, to put it politely, been "economical with the actualité" all 
the way through this process, such as the claim that he waited "about 4 
days" for discussion here to die down when in fact the actual time was 
38 hours.


Whilst there's still discussion going on about (for example) which way 
around a colon-separated tag should go it makes sense to me to at the 
very least step back for a bit.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] New OSM Quick-Fix service

[Andy Townsend]

On 14/10/2017 12:06, Yuri Astrakhan wrote:

Andy, the query works fine, you probably hit it during the update.
That now produces a worldwide map showing where mappers have used a 
particular tag.  Except in the case of typing errors you shouldn't be 
changing tagX to tagY without any other knowledge without following 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Automated_Edits_code_of_conduct (as 
noted many times by many people previously).


As an aside, based on what I'm worried that you're trying to do, the UI 
is absolutely garbage.  I see buttons that do things like "Add variable 
containing entity label"(whatever that means) and a "Filter" button that 
adds a dropbox with no items in it.  It's likely that many people trying 
to use this will make edits by mistake.


  Also, I just updated some queries at Quick_fixes 
 - they now able to 
record when change should be rejected.  The IP address has been 
unchanged ever since I announced the OSM+Wikidata service.

But who knows what it is?  It doesn't even support https!

Regards,
Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] New OSM Quick-Fix service

[Andy Townsend]

On 17/10/2017 08:29, Tobias Zwick wrote:


Does the dev API have real (=mirrored) data?


It has whatever data you add to it.  I've used it in the past to 
demonstrate a "different way of mapping something" by copying everything 
from live to dev in a small area and then making the changes in that 
small area.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Could we just pause any wikidata edits for a month or two?

[Andy Townsend]

On 23/10/2017 11:40, Ryszard Mikke wrote:

That seems like a problem to fix in Wikipedia


Part of the problem is that some of these problems simply aren't fixable 
at wikipedia.  For example 
https://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D1%80%D0%B1%D0%B8%D1%98%D0%B0 and 
https://sq.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbia are allegedly the same article and 
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q403 lists them both. However, as can be 
seen by looking at the maps on each page, they aren't the same 
geographic entity - one includes Kosovo, one does not.  Neither is 
"wrong" from the point of view of the authors of each page yet they 
can't both be "correct" at the same time.


Best Regards,
Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Could we just pause any wikidata edits for a month or two?

[Andy Townsend]

On 23/10/2017 12:39, Tomas Straupis wrote:



How were the people asked? I can only see very short note in Lithuanian. I
can' understand it, but it doesn't seem like "do not touch" request...

   Have you noticed the title of this thread? ;-)


For completeness, I pointed this out 11 months ago, in English, on 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/43836371#map=8/54.872/22.250 .  
The advice was ignored.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] How to create custom online map from OpenStreetMap

[Andy Townsend]

On 22/10/2017 18:47, Carlos Cámara wrote:
I would like to create a custom map for online use that loads OSM data 
but displays it in different ways as the standard, cyclemap, 
transport... layers.


Another couple of resources to look at (if you think you'll go down the 
"Mapnik" route):


To create a tile server with the same stylesheet as OSM's "standard" one:
https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04-2-lts/

Modifying map styles, and much more:
https://ircama.github.io/osm-carto-tutorials/

Best Regards,
Andy


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[OSM-talk] Individual wiki pages (was Re: weeklyOSM #379 2017-10-17-2017-10-23)

[Andy Townsend]

On 29/10/2017 08:57, Dave F wrote:
Going off topic, I know, but why is this 'Derbyshire' page even in 
OSM's wiki? It's meant to have details about how to map not trying to 
compete with Wikipedia.


It's not competing with wikipedia.  It's a list of links to other 
OSM-related stuff and "what people are mapping or have mapped" there.  
For example, you won't find a link to the OSM boundary relation for 
Amber Valley in wikipedia, likewise not any of the long or short 
distance trails on the sub-pages (and good luck finding much of that 
information anywhere else).


Part of the reason for having trails listed was to complement 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_long_distance_paths 
for shorter local paths.  You can't find the names of these with 
Nominatim.  You can with taginfo (e.g. 
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=pennine+bridleway#values ) - 
but even then you have to go over overpass turbo to get the data and 
it's really not straightforward.


As more tools around OSM appear the need for pages like the Derbyshire 
one reduces, but there will still be a need for community-related stuff 
such as https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nottingham/Pub_Meetup .


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] weeklyOSM - Mapbox updates

[Andy Townsend]

On 29/10/2017 18:09, Safwat Halaby wrote:

Hmm, around the same times the Mapbox updates stopped[1],  OsmCHA[2]
stopped showing new changesets and I reported[3] that. Perhaps it was
an unintended side-effect of whatever Mapbox did?


That's something at your end: I think https://osmcha.mapbox.com/ shows 
updates from "2 minutes ago" for me.  The filters (e.g. for searching by 
HOT task number) have also been working.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Sudden influx of bad HOTosm edits in West Bank

[Andy Townsend]

On 29/10/2017 17:18, Safwat Halaby wrote:

There's a sudden influx of bad edits by different users related to
Palestine HotOSM tasks.


There's a "I've seen a problem; what should I do?" section on 
http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Data_Working_Group which explains the 
steps to follow.  You've already been doing that (for which thanks), but 
I mention it for the benefit of anyone else reading this who's 
unfamiliar with the process.


Where these are new mappers I'd suggest a "hello and welcome" message 
that asks a bit more about how they're contributing and what the 
problems are with it (for example - 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/536519974 has no tags but appears to 
be tracing over https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/519139010 from 2 
months ago).  I'm sure that these new mappers mean well, but they 
clearly haven't understood the task that they've been asked to perform 
(or perhaps that task was somewhat inappropriate for brand-new users in 
a place as densely populated as the West Bank). Try and find out if 
they're volunteers (e.g. they're volunteered to give up their own time 
to help improve the mapping in this area) or if they've perhaps been 
told to "map 100 buildings as part of this HOT task" in order to gain a 
credit for part of a course they're doing.


I'd also (and this would greatly help both the new mapper and the DWG) 
point out specific issues in each changeset, such as "way xyz does not 
have any tags, and without any tags no-one trying to use OSM data will 
know what it is" or "building abc overlaps with another building, which 
clearly can't be the case in reality".


Often there are a mix of edits from well-meaning brand-new HOT mappers - 
some that need reverting immediately because they actually break stuff 
(e.g. inadvertant node drags), some that need tidying and some that are 
perfectly OK to leave.  Having changeset discussion comments explaining 
what is what makes any future post-newbie tidy-up much easier.


Best Regards,

Andy (DWG member)


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Re: [OSM-talk] Sudden influx of bad HOTosm edits in West Bank

[Andy Townsend]

On 29/10/2017 21:33, Safwat Halaby wrote:

User "Andrew" added things like "world's biggest refrigerator", "WHEEL
OF FORTUNE", "ANDREWS BIGGEST CAR", "Concrete Thing", etc.


For completeness, http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/sFM shows "Andrew's Dream Car".

Reverting edits such as this makes sense to me.

Best Regards,
Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Sudden influx of bad HOTosm edits in West Bank

[Andy Townsend]

On 31/10/2017 12:43, Frederik Ramm wrote:


Have we found out anything about this yet?


None of the users who have entries in changeset discussions have 
commented in those discussions, including the person who created the 
task at HOT.  I also don't see any attempt to tidy up the data after the 
event (but to be fair it is only 2 days - I'd usually wait a few more 
days before assuming that I won't get a reply).


It'd be great if some of the people in this thread could volunteer to 
help these mappers achieve what they are trying to achieve and learn how 
to edit OSM productively.  Unfortunately the DWG can't be everywhere - 
we rely very much on everyone else in the community to help new 
mappers.  As has been said before most of the problems here (as 
elsewhere) are just new mapper issues and are relatively easily resolved.


Also, don't forget there are really good examples of how to do this 
elsewhere - look at the work the Irish community has done with both 
remote and local mapping in Lesotho, for example.


Best Regards,

Andy



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Re: [OSM-talk] Sudden influx of bad HOTosm edits in West Bank

[Andy Townsend]

For info, here's an example changeset discussion comment I've just 
written.  Where new mappers are not quite getting the hang of things 
it'd be great if before someone leaps to the mailing list to either 
complain abot or defend HOT and HOT mappers they could offer them advice 
and help about how to get better:



"Hello and welcome to OpenStreetMap!
Looking at some of the changes here such as $example I think you may be 
"overinterpreting" the imagery somewhat.
If you look at the different imagery choices available you can get a 
feeling for the scale quite well, and its clear that none or almost none 
of the buildings that you've added here actually are buildings (that's 
clear with both Bing and your custom imagery - in fact your custom 
imagery, if later, suggests that buildings shown on Bing have been removed).
Assuming you're not in the West Bank at the moment, what I'd suggest is 
that you try mapping things more locally to you first - often it's 
useful to look at the imagery of a place you know well to see how 
certain features look from the air.  It can be difficult to tell roads 
from e.g. riverbeds if you're not careful.
If you're in $country (guessing, based on your editor locale of $locale 
above) then there are lots of local groups both HOT-based and non-HOT 
based where you can discuss mapping; there are also mailing lists and 
other forums - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact has lots of 
details.

Best Regards,
Andy"

It'd also be great to refer mappers to other learning resources like the 
wiki beginners' guide or learnosm, but that can be a bit difficult since 
it's difficult to know what they've seen so far


Regards,
Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Sudden influx of bad HOTosm edits in West Bank

[Andy Townsend]

On 31/10/2017 16:00, john whelan wrote:


Often they have no knowledge of OpenStreetMap or their local area.  To 
them it's just helping the Red Cross or whatever.


Everybody (unless they're "serving life without parole") has knowledge 
of _some_ local area.  If people really don't know what they're doing in 
OSM, maybe they could better help the Red Cross in some other way?


More generally, it seems to be quite cruel to take someone with no 
knowledge of the climate, landscape and architecture a foreign country 
and with little knowledge of geography and (in the most recent case) map 
scales, and expect them to make sensible additions to OSM.  It's not 
their fault that their contributions are net negative; they've been set 
a near-impossible task.  It's even worse if they're students and they're 
actually going to be assessed on the results.


Someone's creating these tasks and someone (not necessarily the same 
person) is assigning them to brand new mappers.  It seems a real shame 
that they're not bothering to look at what has worked in the past and 
learning from that, not asking for feedback or assistance as they go on 
and not helping HOT volunteers do the thing that they're trying to help 
with - the technical solutions (task manager etc.) are in place but the 
human bit's missing.


Best Regards,
Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Label language on the Default stylesheet

[Andy Townsend]

On 01/11/2017 13:28, Oleksiy Muzalyev wrote:
Still, the OSM map remains unusable on the global scale. For instance, 
I read an article about the new railroad North-South. I wanted to see 
it on the OSM map but I could not even find Iran on the map. 


Works for me:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=6/31.887/52.844&layers=T

Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Label language on the Default stylesheet

[Andy Townsend]

On 01/11/2017 13:43, Pierre Béland wrote:
Nice, I often had problems while editing or validating in countries 
with non latin alphabet. Will this be automaticly overlayed to the map 
based on your language option ?


I was being facetious of course - it's just the "Transport" map as seen 
at osm.org.  Actually what I normally use is a map-site that allows you 
to switch between layers including the openstreetmap.de ones (such as 
https://a.tile.openstreetmap.de/tiles/osmde/5/20/12.png .


The slightly more serious point that I was trying to make was that one 
map style can't do everything - if you want to see latin (script, not 
language) names there are options available for you to do that right 
now.  I quite like the idea that the "standard" map tries to use the 
local language and doesn't impose one culture's view of what things 
should be called - and using Latin (the language) worldwide is of course 
not really any different to that - if you truly wanted a "language that 
has been in use for a long time and is spoken by a lot of people" you'd 
pick a version of Chinese.


Best Regards,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] Odd mapping in Atar Mauritania

[Andy Townsend]

On 08/11/2017 12:51, john whelan wrote:


One mapper has a thousand untagged ways in Mauritania most of which 
are of this type.  I have sent a note to them but not yet heard 
anything back.


You may have already also done some of these, for completeness and for 
the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with these options:


o One or more changeset discussion comments, including in a language 
that they actually speak (in this case, based on the locale in the 
changeset tags, French).  A bad online translation will likely have some 
words they recognise in it, even if the overall translation quality is 
up there with "English As She Is Spoke".  Don't expect a response 
immediately though, if someone is trekking in the Sahara it may be some 
time before they read it.


o Try and contact other mappers in the same country and talk to them 
about it.  Maybe someone knows someone who can talk to the mapper?


o If they're still actively doing it and seem not to be getting any 
messages have a look at the "I've seen a problem; what should I do?" 
section of http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Data_Working_Group - we 
can send them a message that they need to read before continuing (and 
hopefully fix their email).


Also, and most obviously, if you fancy having a go at fixing some of 
these "giant buildings" then of course you can!


Best Regards,
Andy (DWG member)

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Re: [OSM-talk] Odd mapping in Atar Mauritania

[Andy Townsend]

On 08/11/2017 17:40, john whelan wrote:
... and to be honest how does one correct this stuff?  Move the points 
so only one building is mapped?  Delete and redraw would be faster but 
then you lose the history.


There are lots of examples in OSM of things being mapped "roughly" first 
and then having more detail added to them later.  I'd re-use the nodes 
that you can that define corners of buildings but not get too worried 
about history.  This is certainly how the centre of London got mapped, 
and many other places too I suspect.


Best Regards,
Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] New OSM Quick-Fix service

[Andy Townsend]

On 13/11/2017 19:36, Yuri Astrakhan wrote:

> That's why I think Sophox is a much better and safer alternative to 
JOSM's autofixes.


At the risk of repeating something that's been said multiple times 
previously, with JOSM autofixes you're performing edits in an area where 
you've already edited.  You're presumably somewhat familiar with what's 
there (you may even have actually visited in person and seen what it 
looks like on the ground).


With your "tool" you're simply performing a mechanical edit with no 
experience of the underlying data.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] New OSM Quick-Fix service

[Andy Townsend]

On 13/11/2017 21:19, Yuri Astrakhan wrote:


Andy, as I stated before, JOSM doesn't force you to edit in your area 
- it shows you whatever data you download. OverpassT can provide it to 
JOSM anywhere too. Your query in Sophox can be limited to an area, or 
can be anywhere - it all depends on the task's query. Also, you keep 
misusing the word "mechanical edit" (per wiki definition, see my other 
email).  Don't dilute the term.




Unfortunately, a mechanical edit looks exactly like what you're doing - 
see https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/53598691 for example.  The 
tags on that as they stand (before or after your edit) don't make a 
whole lot of sense - likely there's a whole bunch of stuff there yet to 
be mapped, and maybe someone more familiar with the area would know if 
either the "memorial" or "marsh" tags make any sense.


Best Regards,
Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] New OSM Quick-Fix service

[Andy Townsend]

On 13/11/2017 22:31, Yuri Astrakhan wrote:
...  Maybe I should write up an FAQ with all the arguments raised 
here, and simply refer to them? It would save on typing.


No, maybe you should just listen and act on the feedback that you're 
getting here.  There have been an awful lot of replies in this thread, 
and the vast majority have been directly critical of what you're doing here.


As JB said earlier ("Did someone already said that you mix issues?"), 
you're deliberately trying to confuse and distort what people have said 
(also e.g. "I can only assume you agree with the rest of my argument").


In the mean time, I receive *multiple* private emails of support from 
people who feel intimidated to discuss it here


Ah, that old chestnut.  Unfortunately we have absolutely no evidence for 
this other than your word for it, and as you've not been entirely honest 
in the past*, such statements carry little weight.


Best Regards,
Andy

* https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2017-October/079085.html


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Re: [OSM-talk] weeklyOSM #382 2017-11-07-2017-11-13

[Andy Townsend]

On 17/11/2017 17:52, Mikel Maron wrote:
Yes, doing this is hard work, and appreciate the job WeeklyOSM has to 
do. Point is, statements like "Yuri is as unreasonable as before and 
tries to ignore all the unwritten rules in OSM" is inappropriate, and 
there are many better ways to summarize the topic.


Well to be fair, the article as written didn't actually say that - it 
said "is perceived by many as unreasonable".


Full disclosure - I'm an occasional contributor to the weekly OSM 
newsletter.  I didn't add or edit that article (actually I didn't 
contribute to any last week - you can usually tell the ones I've written 
because they have more links and perhaps too many words in them), but 
although perhaps a little over-concise I don't think you could argue 
with "perceived by many as unreasonable" - just wade through the recent 
archives of the talk mailing list again and weigh the arguments for and 
against.  Also, there is such a thing as "fake balance".  Imagine you're 
running an article about someone who's discussing ways to offset the 
problems caused by the Mercator projection; you don't then need to also 
quote someone from the Flat Earth Society for the sake of impartiality.


Secondly - and this is a point that applies to many other areas of OSM 
too - there seem far more people willing to contribute their 
copy-editing skills here on a mailing list than actually helping put 
_next_ week's newsletter together.  It's not a new phenomenon - a short 
while ago WeeklyOSM had a complaint from an OSM-centric organisation 
(let's call it "X") that "we never report on what's happening with X".  
It was politely suggested to the complainer that perhaps they ought to 
volunteer themselves; then they could submit all the articles they 
like.  It went very quiet after that.


It's a similar situation with technical discussions elsewhere ("you 
ought to render X like Y", "you ought to change how the osm.org website 
works so I don't have to build infrastructure for $project", "Nominatim 
ought to support my $odd_non_address_search_example").


Although there's always room for improvement, much of what's around OSM 
now has a surprisingly low bar for entry, whether it's creating a map 
based on OSM data that shows $favourite_but_quite_rare_tag, or answering 
questions on the help site or forum, or as here, volunteering to submit 
and review a few news articles a week.


Best Regards,
Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] weeklyOSM #382 2017-11-07-2017-11-13

[Andy Townsend]

On 17/11/2017 22:52, Clifford Snow wrote:


Frederik,
I think we are all thankful for the newsletter. And believe they are 
free to publish to their own standards. However, because they use OSM 
resources by publishing on our mailing lists they need respect our 
values. I don't think asking a publication to be respectful to 
individuals is asking too much.


Clifford,
Being "respectful" is a two-way street.  This is a situation that's been 
going on for almost exactly a year now.  During that time this 
individual has shown contempt for the OSM community, including on 
occasion telling outright untruths.  Conversations with him were very 
repectful at first (conducted in changeset discussions rather than on 
mailing lists), but it gradually became clear that any statements such 
as "I have already stopped changing any objects except" were simply 
worthless.  At some point you have to call a lie a lie, and I can't 
think of a way of doing that without "being disrespectful".


Also, I have to object to the use of "they" and "our" in your comment.  
The OSM Weekly is produced by and for people from the OSM community, 
exactly the same community that the mailing lists are run by and for.  
The use of that sort of divisive language ("they") reminds me of a visit 
to South Africa back in the 90s, and not in a good way.


Best Regards,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] Effecting change in OpenStreetMap

[Andy Townsend]

On 21/11/2017 13:47, Darafei "Komяpa" Praliaskouski wrote:


I've posted a -dev mail about reusing nighttime of tile rendering 
servers. Some likes on GitHub, some reviews from passer-by's, no 
merge, nothing about "what to fix to get it merged". For a year. 
Patience you say?

https://github.com/openstreetmap/mod_tile/pull/152


Whilst I'm not a contributor to the repository there, I do have some 
familiarity with the code.  What you seem to be doing is interpreting 
the mod_tile repository as "part of the infrastructure of 
OpenStreetMap.org", and you seem to be viewing OpenStreetMap.org as an 
end-user Google Maps competitor, not as a "creating map data enabler".  
I regularly use mod_tile on memory-limited machines and would be 
concerned if I was suddenly not able to process as large data extracts 
that I could previously.  I don't see any thought given in what you're 
proposing to what the knock-on effects of your change would be.




/map call is technically 40x slower than it should be, but issue is 
being closed with "we are not complete idiots" comments. No action 
taken wherever.

https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/135


The second line of your issue starts "This causes hatred when editing 
something", which is not exactly helpful if you want an in-depth 
investigation of a perceived performance problem.  Despite this, the 
conversation that follows covers in detail the status of the problem, 
and a suggestion to you where you can help.  Your contributions there 
(at https://github.com/zerebubuth/openstreetmap-cgimap/issues/122 ) 
stopped after a day.


I've said elsewhere the developing things _around_ OpenStreetMap and 
with OpenStreetMap data has a surprisingly low barrier to entry - you 
just download the data and off you go; there's no API with Ts and Cs to 
negotiate.  However, _changing_ the way that the the project or the 
existing osm.org infrastructure does something will necessarily require 
a series of arguments to be made and people to be persuaded, and it 
seems to me that you haven't successfully done that yet, just as Yuri 
didn't with his approach to mechanical editing, which led indirectly to 
the WeeklyOSM article and the thread that this one developed from.


Where there are competing requirements (and there are always competing 
requirements) you can't always expect everyone to agree the your view of 
the requirements is the "most valid" one - see for example 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/765 .  I took 
the hint from that to create something else with OSM data that was (for 
my purposes) better; perhaps you could do the same?


Best Regards,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] How to show school icons ?

[Andy Townsend]

On 24/11/2017 12:23, Daniel Koć wrote:

W dniu 24.11.2017 o 08:57, David SAUVAGE pisze:

What would be the process to change this situation in order for school
icons to be displayed on osm map with the same priority of a library ?


Let me quote what I've just wrote in the osm-carto issue tracker:

"We had a PR which was almost ready, but we were unable to decide how 
to deal with label scaling, because we do this for schools and the 
icon is not to be scaled. There are also other similar objects (like 
hospitals etc), which use the icon, but don't use text scaling, so 
that would be inconsistent.


So the most important thing is to find a rule for all such objects. If 
we have it, rendering education icons could be made quite easily."


As an aside, if the discussion (which is now at 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/120 ) doesn't 
work out, it may also be possible to create your own map tiles based on 
a style that you create.  If you want to create the same sort of map 
tiles that you can see at OpenStreetMap.org you can follow instructions 
at https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04-2-lts/ 
.  There are other options too (see 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Rendering for some of those). If 
you're trying to follow instructions such as those and get stuck you 
could try asking on IRC (see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IRC ) - 
the #osm and #osm-dev channels are English-language ones, but there will 
be people available to help there, and there's also #osm-fr in French 
where I'm sure people will be able to help too.


Best Regards,

Andy



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Re: [OSM-talk] Planned rendering changes of protected areas

[Andy Townsend]

On 30/11/17 13:46, Daniel Koć wrote:

Hi,

I'm thinking about changes in rendering of protected areas on 
osm-carto and I wanted to give community a hint, because it's a 
popular kind of objects. There is a fresh discussion about it from 
this comment on:


https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/603#issuecomment-347879897 



In short:

1. Currently leisure=nature_reserve (old scheme) and boundary=* (new 
scheme) are frequently tagged in parallel, and it looks like the old 
scheme is used as a hack just to make it visible on default map.


(snipped)

Actually one more thing (prompted by SK53 on IRC) - the area of a nature 
reserve is sometimes != the protected area, as noted here:


https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/603#issuecomment-348480276

I can think of a few examples locally - one for example is signed as an 
SSSI* but not a nature reserve:


http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/53745064/history

also apparently the "reserve" area at Muston 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/52.9219/-0.7766 doesn't match the 
protected area.


Obviously this is orthoganal to what gets rendered and what doesn't, but 
there's certainly a case for using both tags.


Best Regards,
Andy


* Site of Special Scientific Interest.  Probably maps onto a 
"protect_class" or something.



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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM tagging validation lib

[Andy Townsend]

On 24/12/17 11:49, Darafei "Komяpa" Praliaskouski wrote:



It would be cool to have such library running on osm2pgsql import, 
fixing and complaining/skipping all the mistaked tag usage it can 
detect. This can possibly resurrect some objects that are lost because 
of typos or old tagging schemes.




That already exists - the lua tag transformation process can do exactly 
that.  Here's an example:


https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/SomeoneElse-style/blob/master/style.lua#L2056

Obviously whether a particular map style wants to render typing / 
tagging errors is a different matter entirely.


Best Regards,

Andy




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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM tagging validation lib

[Andy Townsend]

On 24/12/17 18:41, john whelan wrote:

True but it's to do with data quality and avoiding the need to validate.


I don't think that different presets will "avoid the need to validate" 
in any scenario (HOT or otherwise) - the only thing that will do that is 
education and training - and having those educated and trained people 
come back again to do more mapping.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Standard map style contributions

[Andy Townsend]

On 28/12/2017 10:45, Daniel Koć wrote:


However after almost half a year we still don't have too many 
contributions from other people and I'm curious what are the main 
obstacles which prevent it and what else could we possibly change to 
make it easier? There's also more basic question: how many people are 
interested in contributing to osm-carto at all?


Speaking entirely personally, the main issue is just 
selfishness/laziness.  I don't use the OSM Carto style much myself 
(there'd be too much information missing at the zoom levels I typically 
use) so I wouldn't get much benefit myself from an accepted change.  In 
case it helps anyone who does want to contribute but doesn't quite know 
where to start I've added a diary entry 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SomeoneElse/diary/43041 that explains 
what I needed to do to submit 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/2966 . There's 
actually a surprisingly large amount that needs to be done to support 
(in this case) 7 lines of changed code.


I'd also not assume that everyone is familar with CSS.  In addition, the 
somewhat arcane way that some of the selections for layers are done in 
project.mml is, shall we say, not always that easy to follow.


Another reason why I've not added more pull requests is that in some 
cases I don't think that they'd be accepted.  If I offered to "fix" the 
main problem described by 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/765 I'm 
pretty sure that it wouldn't be accepted.  As described in 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/master/CARTOGRAPHY.md 
, OSM Carto has somewhat conflicting goals - both as "an important 
feedback mechanism for mappers" and as an "exemplar stylesheet". Any map 
style will always be a compromise of course; you can't have "everything 
louder than everything else" which is why the requests for some features 
to be rendered will be denied (although I suspect that we underestimate 
how much more opportunity these is for rendering features at high zoom 
levels only).


Another reason is I suspect the "jumping through hoops" needed to get 
something accepted.  See for example the discussion on 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/2355 - it's 
clear that there's unlikely to be complete agreement there, and the 
result is no solution at all (essentially "perfect is the enemy of good").


With the last two issues it's difficult to know what to suggest - there 
has to be an overall style "direction" otherwise you just end up with 
something that is a bit of a mess.  Likewise there have to be some 
standards, but sometimes I suspect that if the maintainers actually want 
to see a fix to a particular problem that they'll need help potential 
contributors a bit more.  Obviously the docker info is a step in the 
right direction (I've not tried that myself so I can't point to specific 
pitfalls there).


Anyway, I hope the above helps (and please understand that it's not 
meant as a criticism either of the style or the maintainers - it's just 
trying to provide answers to the questions that were asked).


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Automatically generated changeset discussion comments by OSMCha

[Andy Townsend]

On 12/01/2018 14:07, Michael Reichert wrote:

Hi,

OSMCha started posting comments to changesets a few days ago when a user
marks a changeset as good or bad.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/wille/diary/43101
I would like to ask the author(s) of OSMCha to disable this feature.


The example given at 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/wille/diary/43101 is certainly 
"insufficiently localised" to European eyes (alternatively, "written by 
a six-year-old") - every sentence ends with an exclamation mark*.


More seriously, any automatic use of OSM messages is problematical 
because it devalues the messages that we want people to actually read - 
the ones that are composed by and sent be a human, and have actual 
useful information in them (and I'm glad to see that Mike N said "I 
haven't used this yet because I wanted to add my own detail to the 
message" - that's exactly what should be happening).


Best Regards,
Andy

* apparently, according to 
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170301-what-overusing-exclamation-marks-says-about-you 
, this is a matter of life and death :)



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Re: [OSM-talk] Automatically generated changeset discussion comments by OSMCha

[Andy Townsend]

On 12/01/2018 14:52, Bryan Housel wrote:

- “To European eyes the comments look like they were written by a six-year-old”


Be nice everyone!


Bryan, this is "being nice" in English.  It's a reply that incorporates 
a certain amount of humour (quotes around sarcasm, link to 
not-entirely-serious article containing an example where "Punctuation 
saves lives", smiley at the end).  It's an attempt to say that yes, 
there really is a problem here to be fixed, but doing it in a way that 
attempts to get that message across in a humorous way to distract from 
the necessarily negative message.


 Best Regards,
Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Roundabouts - why is a separate segment required?

[Andy Townsend]

(... snip ...)
Technically speaking you are not because you are just touching one 
node of the roundabout.


Yes you are. You may not be on there very long, but you approach the
roundabout, pass the signs saying it's a roundabout, give way to those
already on it, you enter it & then indicate that you're leaving it.


Not from a data standpoint.


OSM's "lines and points" abstraction is just an abstraction of the real 
world.  In the real world you're on a road, and you're joining the 
roundabout, staying there for a bit and then leaving it again on the 
next road.  Having one exit node not joined to the next entry node 
better represents the real-world situation*.


Best Regards,
Andy


* unless you happen to be riding a Spherical Cow along one of those 
"frictionless surfaces" I remember from Applied Maths at school many 
years ago.


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Re: [OSM-talk] Roundabouts - why is a separate segment required?

[Andy Townsend]

On 14/02/2018 18:57, Dave F wrote:



On 14/02/2018 18:32, Andy Townsend wrote:
Having one exit node not joined to the next entry node better 
represents the real-world situation*.


Disagree.
Sharing a node should make no difference to the real world or a 
router's perception of it. 


With separate nodes, you travel along the roundabout way for a small 
distance (as you do in real life).  With a shared node, you don't. 
They're topologically different.


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Re: [OSM-talk] Roundabouts - why is a separate segment required?

[Andy Townsend]

On 15/02/2018 16:49, Dave F wrote:
Again, the way containing the shared node has junction=roundabout in 
it. You are entering & exiting a roundabout


Using that argument elsewhere, if I drive northwest up the A446 at 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1165#map=17/52.55098/-1.73102 "the way 
containing the shared node" (https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/25244878 
) is part of a motorway link.  That doesn't means I'm not allowed to 
cycle around the roundabout.


More generally, if you find yourself in a discussion and _everyone else_ 
disagrees with you, isn't that perhaps a bit of a hint that you might 
want to reconsider what you're saying?


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Danger zone for pedestrians

[Andy Townsend]

On 05/03/2018 11:49, Richard wrote:

this one problem could be (somewhat) solved by conditional restrictions,


No, this is not an access restriction - people are allowed to go there 
whenever they like; it might just not be advisable.


I'd be against mapping non-quantifiable risks like this because it fails 
the https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Verifiability test - as has 
already been discussed, one person might feel safe; another may not.  A 
"feeling of safety" likely has little bearing on actual risk (for 
example, during the breakup of Yugoslavia someone was worried about me 
visiting Prague) and there are many problems associated with assuming 
that one reflects the other (see e.g. 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/08/12/the-many-problems-with-sketchfactor-the-new-crime-crowdsourcing-app-that-some-are-calling-racist/ 
).


As to actual tagging of anything _quantifiable_, then perhaps the 
"tagging" list is the better place for that.


Best Regards,

Andy




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Re: [OSM-talk] Help me build an OSM Community Index

[Andy Townsend]

On 31/03/18 13:25, Bryan Housel wrote:

I’ve started building an index of OSM community resources here:
https://github.com/osmlab/osm-community-index

"Resources" can be links to forums, meetups, Slack groups, Facebook 
groups, mailing lists, and so on. Anything that mappers, especially 
beginners, might find interesting or helpful.





I think that's an excellent idea - quite often I'd like to recommend 
something to a mapper in a country that I'm not familiar with, and it 
can be difficult to do that if you're unfamiliar with the local 
community (and especially if they're using non-open communication 
channels that can be less easy to "just drop in on").


However I'm a bit confused about what sort of contributions you want - 
https://github.com/osmlab/osm-community-index/issues/new loads a 
template that seems to be looking for something in Markdown format (one 
per resource) with a geojson file (I think - it's really not clear).  
I'd be happy to provide information that you could use to create the 
content you want, but I've no idea how to provide what the site seems to 
be asking for (and I suspect I won't be alone in that).


For example, for GB I'd suggest:

o That international resources such as the help site and the wiki are 
likely to be the first best point of contact


o That the most commonly used local resource is probably the talk-gb 
mailing list https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb (but note 
that the part of the UK that is on the island of Ireland is best served 
by https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ie), and there's also 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-scotland and other 
regional lists.


o That there's usually someone able to respond to "ad hoc" questions in 
#osm-gb on IRC (but I'd link to that via http://wiki.osm.org/wiki/IRC as 
other international channels may be relevant too).


o There are regular meetups in at least London 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/London#Upcoming_Events , Scotland, 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Edinburgh#Social_Events , West 
Midlands https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mappa_Mercia#Meetings, and 
East Midlands https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nottingham/Pub_Meetup .


o There's a "loomio" site (accessible from 
https://osmuk.org/pinned/join-the-conversation/) associated with the 
OSMF chapter in the UK https://osmuk.org/ , although that is very low 
volume right now (though that may change, of course).


There are also I'm sure a bunch of twitter accounts associated with 
individuals and groups - but I'd hesitate to try and sort the wheat from 
the chaff there.  I'm sure I'll have missed stuff too (and another 
person's list of resources might differ from my subjective list.


Is that sort of information useful?

Best Regards,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] highway="corridor" tag

[Andy Townsend]

On 05/05/2018 17:07, Richard Marsden wrote:

My code is being surprised by a number of corridors that are tagged
highway="corridor".

The two examples I have in-front of me are both in Dublin, Ireland; at
Stephen's Green Mall and St James Hospital.

I say surprised because the page
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features does not list this
corridor tagging, and my code assumes unknown highway tags are
vehicle-routable (and filters out footpaths, stairs, etc).



That seems ... courageous*.  There are few enough values for "highway" 
at taginfo (see https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/highway#values ) 
to be able to choose only the ones that you want.


Realistically, if you're blacklisting rather than whitelisting you'll 
potentially think that every typo (like 
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/highway=apath ) is vehicle 
routable.  You probably don't want to do that.


Best Regards,

Andy


* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik8JT2S-kBE


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