I have occasionally encountered untagged ways. If they are part of a relation, I leave them alone of course. If they are not part of a relation and were recently added I leave them alone on the assumption that the author is still in the process of doing something. Normal mapping should not leave untagged ways as an intermediate result, but its probably better to err on the side of caution here and not mess up somebody elses work.
If they are older, you can often see what they are supposed to be. Buildings, roads, waterways. If that's the case and they look reasonable, I'd tag them as such. If they look totally bogus, I just delete them. If I am unsure, I leave things as they are. There is always a judgement call when mapping with OSM. Jochen On Thu, May 22, 2025 at 10:48:48AM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote: > Date: Thu, 22 May 2025 10:48:48 -0400 > From: Greg Troxel <g...@lexort.com> > To: John Whelan <jwhelan0...@gmail.com> > Cc: OSM Talk <talk@openstreetmap.org> > Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Concern over untagged ways and map roulette > > Generally, I think when people focus on deleting things, that's bad. > > Do you really mean ways with no tags at all? That's kind of a mess. > > > John Whelan <jwhelan0...@gmail.com> writes: > > > Sometimes I come across a settlement where there might be fifty > > buildings mapped but not tagged. My thoughts are it really is better > > to tag them than delete them. > > So 50 closed ways, obviously buildings (given what we know about the > world), but with no tags at all? > > Agreed, one should either: > > - do nothing > - comment on the changeset that added them and ask > - glance at some other data, enough to convince oneself that odds are > >90% they are building, and if so, add building=yes > > I see a lot of deletionist activty as vandalism. > > _______________________________________________ > talk mailing list > talk@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk -- Jochen Topf joc...@remote.org https://www.jochentopf.com/ +49-351-31778688 _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
