On Tue, Oct 25, 2022 at 4:37 AM Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> wrote:
> If someone does a > lot of good work for OSM otherwise and would really like to record an > ancient former railroad that ran through where their house now sits - I > shrug and let them do it. Only if someone starts to make it their > mission to map every ancient railroad in the country and/or create > relations so that you can see where trains used to ride in 1848 is when > I'll ask them to stop and find a better place for it. > This does seem to be the mission of not just one mapper but quite a few railway mappers. They are trying to maintain a historical network of railways for display on openrailwaymap.org and they like it to be a connected network without gaps. I can understand this desire, but it leads to conflicts when, for example, a huge 8 lane highway has been built across a section of razed railway. One mapper will say "well clearly there can't be any evidence of the razed railway left when the highway has been built over it", and so will cut out the section of former railway where the highway is. This leaves the sections of razed railway on either side where there probably still is some visible evidence that a railway used to exist. Those sections seem perfectly appropriate to keep. The railway mappers will then get very angry that this section was deleted because now there is a gap in the (former) rail network. This gap exists on the ground, so mapping it as such seems entirely appropriate to me. However, the rail mappers argue that existence of a visible razed railway on either side of the highway is enough evidence for the razed railway to also be mapped across where there is now highway. I've also seen it argued that unless you can 100% prove that there *aren't any* traces of a razed railway then it should be assumed that there are traces and the razed railway should not be deleted. For these railway mappers, this includes traces that are now buried under new construction or underwater in a reservoir. Clearly this is too high a burden of proof, and is not a standard we apply to any other feature type. I understand the desire to have a well connected network map of former railways, but this comes into direct conflict with OSM's primary purpose of mapping the world as it is today. -- Zeke
_______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
