On 8/8/2019 5:52 PM, Bryce Jasmer wrote:
I’m really opposed to this idea of scaring people away from editing objects with the “data freshness” boogie man argument. If someone really cares about freshness, the entire history of an object is available to you.
That's true for any single object. But what if you want to query for stale data in a given area, in preparation for a survey? Accessing each object's history makes the process exponentially more complicated. If you can mange to do that, then you could try to skip edits by known bot accounts... but there are always more. You can try to filter out changesets with bot=yes, which well-behaved bots will set. But lots of people make these wide-ranging edits semi-manually using JOSM or Level0. I understand that this particular objection to armchair data cleanup is far from universal. But the compulsive reformatting of incorrect data makes me roll my eyes a bit. I find it useless bordering on ridiculous when I see a mapped restaurant that's been gone for years, but someone's added branding tags, someone's prefixed the website with http://, someone's reformatted the phone number, someone's fixed the opening hours, someone's corrected the cuisine... but nobody has bothered to see if the place actually still exists. I think my prejudice stems from reading this cautionary tale on the wiki in my OSM infancy: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What%27s_the_problem_with_mechanical_edits%3F (I see now that this was originally written by Frederik Ramm, though I had no idea who that was at the time.) The bottom line, though, is that a well-planned, well-discussed, and well-behaved bot is by far the *best* way to make these sorts of edits, if someone feels they must be made. My preference would be to only touch recently edited objects but that's by no means a dealbreaker. Jason _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
