Andrew, On 05/01/2015 12:04 AM, Andrew MacKinnon wrote: > I am trying to figure out a way of cleaning up incorrect chain store > data in OSM. For example there are 1422 instances of "McDonalds" in > OSM (should be McDonald's) and 203 instances of "Tim Horton's" (should > be Tim Hortons).
That's a very "computer person" approach to take. In fact, the "McDonald's" issue has already been tried by someone in the past with an undiscussed mechanical edit, promptly falsifying a few non-chain non-fastfood places that *really* were called McDonalds just as you mention. It is also an easy fallacy to think that if the marketing people of some chain decide to spell their name differently, we could or should simply replace all names to what they "should" be - no we don't, we only change the name when the store changes its lettering. We're not a parrot for the marketing department, we observe what's on the ground. OSM editing is usually "holistic" - you work on many aspects of the map in an area. If the map has many edits by different people in an area then I can reasonably assume that it has a certain minimum quality because these people are on the ground fixing things. If you remote-mass-fix McDonald's, or worse, if you remote-mass-fix all chain stores on an ongoing basis, you create a false impression of activity in an area when in fact all you do is scribble the latest business decision of some corporate marketing department all over OSM. I don't think that is something that really advances the quality in OSM, and I would encourage you to grab a notepad and venture outside to do some mapping. That way you wouldn't be scripting world-wide cleanup operations but who knows, you might actually add real value to OSM. Leave the mis-spelled "McDonalds" to those who map in the area. Maybe it encourages them. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
