On 5/9/2019 4:14 PM, Michael Reichert wrote
Quincy Morgan, one of the maintainers of iD, invented a new tag called nosquare=yes today which should be added to buildings which are not square and should not be flagged by iD's validator.
This strikes me as a pretty bad idea. I map in NYC where we have lots, lots, lots of nearly-square buildings with official footprints imported from the city's open data initiative. When a mapper not familiar with the history here gets a message from iD (which, to many mappers, is indistinguishable from getting a message from OSM itself) encouraging them to square a building, they'll do it because it seems like the right thing to do. So the official, highly-accurate footprints are lost. And adjacent buildings with shared nodes are also distorted. If I were to communicate with this mapper and say "Hi, welcome, please don't square the buildings" it will simply be confusing because the official editor, hosted at https://www.openstreetmap.org, told them they should. JOSM's validator used to flag nearly-square buildings here, and it caused thousands of unnecessary and inaccurate updates to building footprints. And of course people doing these thought they were doing the right thing -- if the validator says there's a problem, there's a problem, right? Fixing it is helping the map! I'd hate to see iD go down the same road. And I certainly don't want to mass-tag all of NYC's imported buildings with nosquare=yes. J _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
