On 23/08/2015, Balaco Baco <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't think so. Wrong data happens to Bing Maps, to Google Maps and > probably to any other map we can obtain, electronically or in a paper. > Maps have dates attached to them - or should have, most of the time. The > fact is that: if I browse around my city, looking for streets and > brindges created in the last fews years, I will see mistakes (as I did > before).
Yes, all maps have errors, wether it is outdated data, data that was never right, or missing data. > But it's better to have there what existed, as it was before, > than have just an emptyness in the area. How so ? Say I'm walking along an old railroad which OSM led me to believe continued for 10km, but is impassable at various points including a wheat field and a housing estate. Or I'm heading to the convenience store only to find it has closed years ago. Outdated data is wrong data, it is misleading and lowers the overall quality of the map. > Until someone fix it > (hopefully) or at least mark it as old, potentially wrong (without > deleting until an update is made!). That's just the normal mapping workflow, nobody is arguing against this. Nobody is proposing to "delete first, improve later". We make the best map we can, within the bounds of our knowledge and time constraints. > In the context being discussed here, recent changes should also cause > data deletion, but that's wrong, in my opinion. Data may be *replaced* > with newer data, with everything that's needed. Same thing here, we improve the map as much as we can. But maybe you don't have enough time right now to map everything, or meadows are so far off in your todo list that you never bother with them. But leaving known-outdated data in place just because you can't yet make a fully detailed mapping of the area doen't make sense either. > If people are doing something that is fiercely against the community > idea of OpenStreetMap, that it could be deleted. But that really seem > far from the truth. There are very few rules in OSM, but one of them is that we map on the ground and that we don't map historical features/events http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice#Map_what.27s_on_the_ground http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice#Don.27t_map_historic_events_and_historic_features Ways like https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/366610457 (and presumably many other railway=dismantled) fail these checks. > So that should be preserved, and its deletion, if > decided to be made, should give a reasonable opportunity for the data > contributors to backup that data - so their work is not lost, but may be > used somewhere else. Yes, giving a heads-up to a mapper when you edit a lot of his work is good etiquette. As for backup, the data is versioned in the db, you can always get the old data back. > Further, I'm not one of the users that would be confused with that. I > would find it unsual to see in a map. But being tagged and noted > somehow, should not be a problem at all. And to say the users who would > be confused with it are the "majority of them", is an vague argument you > do just to give some apparent strength to your idea. And I repeat: I > would not be confused with it, I don't think the majority of users would > be. Since OSM has always had a policy of containing only current data, it stands to reason that the majority of users only expect to find current data in OSM (or rather that anything that isn't current anymore needs to be fixed, and that it was current when it was added to osm). Wether you get confused when stumbling uppon data which violates that rule depends on what you're doing with the data. Remember that interpreting osm data is actually a lot of work. Very few people have the manpower to verify what railroad=dismantled actually mean to decide wheter they want to use or filter out that data. Most of them will just match railway=*, plus perhaps some special cases for railway=rail and railway=subway. Now they're looking at historical data without even knowing it. They are confused. > P. S.: this mailing list does not add a "Reply-to" header to mail > messages, as I'm used to. So I initially sent the answer to just one > person. This should be changed - may it not confuse the majority of > users!? It normally does, not sure what happened here. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
