On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 03:03:53PM +0200, andrzej zaborowski wrote: > On 17 July 2011 23:55, Sarah Hoffmann <[email protected]> wrote: > > I recently stumbled upon some empty route relations, so I had a > > closer look at the OSM planet and found that there are about > > 10.000 orphaned relations in the database and the number is growing. > > > > With orphaned I mean relations that have no members and are not > > member of any other relation. Some are completely empty but most > > still have some tags. I have created a list of the relations sorted > > by last editing user here: > ... > > > > Question remains what to do with the existing orphaned relations. > > Is there any legimate use for them or would it be save to simply > > delete them all? > > So I had stumbled on the same fact about a year ago and after some > discussion on this list I deleted about 8000 empty/orphaned relations. > It seems all except a handful of those 8000 relations had indeed been > left in the not-deleted state by mistake. There were a couple (<5) > that had still been referenced from the wiki, rather than from inside > the database through other relations. I got a couple of e-mails > months later asking about those relations and undeleted them, it would > probably be a good idea to check for references in the wiki beforehand > this time. I don't think it makes sense to create such empty > relations before any members are added to them because it's quite > likely someone else is going to create a duplicate, but I don't have a > strong opinion and being in the losing position as an author of an > automated edit I didn't want to argue with the creators of these > relations.
I must have missed that discussion. So I gather it is pretty pointless to try and fix the database if new empty relations arrive with a rate of about 30 per day, time is better spent improving editors and/or creating a service where people can find their lost relations again. I'll look into it. A more final solution to the problem would be to reject empty relations on the API side. But that still requires fixing the editors first. Maybe something for API 0.7. Sarah _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
