Hi Richard, > I am working my way around the canals of Britain, tracing the canal banks > and tidying up locks etc.
Your work is really welcome and as someone with a particular interest in the British canals I'm glad to see it taking place. In terms of "playing nice with the OSM community", rather than just using OSM as your own personal data store, there are two points I'd like to emphasise: 1. If you find yourself extensively changing existing work, or doing things differently from what you've seen other mappers do, take a minute to reflect. That work is very probably how it is for a reason (for example, the towpaths with highway=cycleway which we corresponded about earlier). You might not be aware of that reason, or you might be aware but disagree with it. In either case, you should take the time to talk to the community and find out why the consensus has formed the way it has. 2. Changeset comments. Be descriptive. Your edits are generally great but, to be (over?) frank, your changeset comments really aren't. "editing canals and related structures" isn't very helpful - it's pretty much "I did some work". Better examples would be: "Tracing waterway outline, north Stratford Canal" "Rationalising lock tagging around Birmingham" "Adding lock names on River Thames" It's not just that it's useful per se - it also demonstrates good faith in your interaction with other mappers. None of us are perfect on this issue, me included, but resorting to a default comment is pretty much always a bad idea. In general, talking to the community is always useful. It magnifies the effect of your work, because others can share their experience with you and vice versa. For example, if you say "I'm mapping CRT boater facilities, I'd like to ask a few questions", others will read up on the consensus and before long all such facilities will be mapped in the same way. If you say "I'm mapping towpaths", someone will come along and say "Great! If you can add connections at bridges to roads, that'll make them routable!". And so on. Don't be fooled by the siren voices of the wiki. What's in the database is valid because it's formed by consensus. What's on the wiki too often isn't. Any fool can invent their own scheme, write "this is how you do it" on the wiki, and most of them do. Wiki users have rationalised their behaviour by promoting a voting scheme, but as this can lead to major changes being approved by just a handful of people, it doesn't have any particular legitimacy. And thanks again for helping improve canal data. :) cheers Richard -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Tagging-of-British-canals-tp5813876p5814339.html Sent from the Great Britain mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
