Godo point SteveA. If I had it to do over again, when I developed this in 2007
for our first edit war over city names in Northern Cyprus, I would have name
this the "On the Ground **Guideline**" rather Rule.
* Mikel Maron * +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron
On Friday, February 7, 2020, 02:15:11 PM EST, stevea
<stevea...@softworkers.com> wrote:
Without touching the Crimea specifically, I'd like to chime in that
"on-the-ground" (OTG) is a good rule, but in reality it must be approached more
like a goal to be achieved where it can be, as we must acknowledge that
realistically, this rule both cannot be and is not applied everywhere under all
circumstances. That is the simple truth and OSM should not pretend otherwise.
Maybe we need to tighten up our language about how we define OTG to better
acknowledge this, clearly and explicitly.
A well-known example is (national, other) boundaries, which frequently do not
exist "on the ground," but our map data would be remiss if it excluded these.
So we do our best to include boundaries even as they are not on-the-ground, but
exist in both de pure and de facto ways in the real world, so OSM expresses
them. Yes, when boundaries are disputed, this is difficult: there is no way
around that and it isn't unique to OSM. I like Mikel's recent suggestion
positing that OSM can better develop tagging that accommodates a wide array of
disputes, as we do have plastic tagging and it can evolve well.
Other examples include large bodies of water and mountain ranges. I've lived
on the Pacific coast most of my life and been to dozens of beaches, but never
once on any beach have I seen a sign which reads "Pacific Ocean." Same with no
signs at the edge of or in the middle of "Rocky Mountains" or "The Alps."
(I've been, and I haven't seen). Yet, OSM maps oceans and mountain ranges.
How do we know their names without anything on the ground? It's a tricky
question which usually starts with some hand-waving (especially for enormous,
major-chunk-of-planet-sized entities like oceans), and progresses to "well,
everybody simply KNOWS that's the Pacific Ocean..." and we are faced with OTG
and an inherent contradiction of what we should do, then we do it anyway.
(Name something without having a solid OTG reality).
To a lesser (weaker) extent, OTG flexibility might also apply to newly
developed routes (bicycle routes are a good example) as these may not be signed
(or well signed), yet a government (whether local, state or national) expresses
these as real (on a public map — just as with a boundary) and poorly signs or
doesn't sign them at all in the real world. OSM uses "unsigned_ref" to denote
these, but it's a fuzzy semantic that doesn't have wide agreement or even
consensus. I have seen the opinion that these shouldn't be in OSM at all,
which seems a shame for things which many local users (of a bike route decreed
by a government, for example) agree do "exist," yet there isn't any OTG
evidence for this. While one tenet of OSM is "don't copy from other maps,"
when the only evidence that something exists is ONLY from a PUBLIC map
(yielding us ODbL permission), we have to reconcile that with OTG. Today, we
don't do that very well.
So, rather than being fully enthusiastic about the absolute application of OTG
(we simply can't), let's realize that it is a good guideline which should be
followed where it can, yet it must include some flexibility which allows for
exceptions. I haven't seen that said (here, yet, perhaps it is elsewhere) and
I believe it is important to be explicit about it.
SteveA
California
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