On 27.05.2013 10:01, Frederik Ramm wrote: > Most "cleaners" become greedy with time. They start fixing a few typos > in their local area and before too long they make overpass queries and > fix "typos" world-wide without even thinking that the tag might indeed > be used differently in other places.
I'm not sure about that. Your experience may describe those cleaners that end up being an issue for DWG, but that's a biased sample. Then again, it seems that we may have different definitions of "greedy" in the first place. Mine excludes typo fixes, regardless of the size of the affected area. > Nothing against someone fixing a couple genuine typos while looking at > the place in question, but as soon as your fixes become so many that you > can't afford to look at what you're changing [...] > then you would really do well to discuss your changes before. Yes, > having to discuss makes such changes a little more cumbersome but they > must not be too easy, or mistakes are more likely to happen. Well, I think I see where you are coming from but I nevertheless disagree with your position. In my opinion, these edits must not be too cumbersome either, or useful improvements will not take place. When the bureaucracy is more work than the research leading up to the edit and the edit itself, I feel a line has been crossed. Current DWG policy appears to focus solely on preventing damage from "mechanical edits" and there is little to balance this consideration with the potential benefits of such edits. To elaborate, I agree that it is the responsibility of anyone performing such edits to research the situation beforehand. However, there is a difference between semantic and syntactic changes in my opinion: Depending on which category your edit is in, the responsibilities are different. For syntactic changes such as typo fixes, I do not consider it necessary to gather on-the-ground evidence, because you are not changing what the data says about the situation on the ground (the semantics). Instead, your responsibility is to check the wiki documentation, the number of uses in taginfo and so on - these are sources for the _syntax_ of tags. If a diligent research using these sources does not turn up a result, then I believe it is ok to perform a change even without discussion (and before someone posts the link again, this means that I disagree with published DWG policy). It is not too much to ask that you document a newly invented tag that could easily be confused with an existing one, if you must use such a confusing tag at all that is. Insisting that we leave rarely used, undocumented misspellings or duplicates alone on the off-chance that they are intentional inventions would mean that we forego the chance to correct the huge majority of such cases which actually are errors. Tobias _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
