Hi, On 10/25/22 19:18, Brian M. Sperlongano wrote:
In my experience, it is more often the opposite situation that happens. A mapper, unaware of the lengthy debates on the topic of former railroads, is mapping her house and removes the bit of abandoned rail currently on the map in that spot, assuming it is a data error or poor import. After all. she's quite aware that there is a house and not a railway at that location as she has personally surveyed it. Sometime later, an abandoned railway enthusiast comes along and angrily harasses the mapper for removing the bit of railway that quite rightly isn't there.
In that situation, I would clearly support the mapper who has deleted the railroad.
(In discussions with abandoned-railway-enthusiasts, you will often get to hear that there are remnants of a railway line that betray the former existence of it to an educated observer. If a new housing development has been built where once there was a railway, then this is obviously not a valid line of argument.)
It's been my experience that allowing enthusiasts to map phantom railways causes far more grief and contention between mappers than simply drawing a line and saying "we don't map things that aren't there."
I agree with that - especially as OSM is very prone to "whataboutism", and before you know it there will be a discussion somewhere about mapping some other long-gone stuff and people will say "but you allow the railways!!!!"
Still I would recommend against, and also word any wiki articles to avoid, someone starting a crusade to get rid of abandoned railways. Delete the ones you encounter while mapping and which you don't see traces of - totally fine. Run an overpass query to find them all and delete them - just causes unnecessary strife.
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
