Also, according to “A Brief History of the Arrowsmith Massif” the old ski resort is completely gone, including the towers, so it’s probably not worth mapping.

This map from the FMBC may be useful.

By the looks of it, the old ski resout was probably about here.

This is already done in the iD editor for popular things like McDonald’s, however, most of those fields (like contact info & hours) can’t be automatically populated.

Also, there is certainly an argument to make for not having noise there to begin with (i.e. strictly validating all tags to make sure they are approved) but that’s a whole other ball of wax.

I think it is worthwhile to distinguish between data that is contrary to ground-truth (or in the case of the source tag, contrary to standardized practice), and data that has no standardized semantics and is just noise.

Noise kinda sucks for editors, and it should certainly be removed, but apart from the annoyance of it, it causes little practical harm. Also, it’s generally easy to remove, both manually and automatically.

As for incorrect data in a tag that has a standardized meaning, well that’s quite bad for (I think) obvious reasons.

Zverik did say he would remove the tags. I imagine the reason an automated tool isn’t being used is because of the general hate for them, and the fact that they can due really stupid things. Also, banner_url isn’t a standard tag, and has no semantics, so it’s temporary presence isn’t terribly harmful.

This does remind me of something else though. Has anyone given much thought to rejecting changesets with nonsensical data (e.g. nodes that have no tags and are not part of a way)? Ideally the editors would flag these errors before allowing a changeset to be submitted, but that isn’t always the case.

These a great tools that I sometimes wish more people would use. Fortunately iD warns users from doing some particularly strange things, but that doesn’t help JSOM/potlatch/vespuci editors.

I believe the name is supposed to be what a thing is typically called by typical people. While an official name (there is a separate tag for official names) for a thing might be ridiculously long, it would be unusual for that to be also how people typically refer to the thing.

And if we’re adding international examples. The LRT in Manila which has “light rail” right in its name, even though it is very similar to the SkyTrain and doesn’t fit the OSM wiki’s definition of light rail.

It seems to me, at least as far as the English language goes, a “subway” is an underground rapid transit system. The description for railway=subway on the OSM wiki matches the category of “rapid transit” much more than it does a “subway”. So what I’m asking is: should OSM consumers just know that railway=subway does not necessarily correspond to what would normally be labelled a subway unless it also has the tunnel=yes tag?

I think what makes SkyTrain not really light rail is that its entirely separated from everything else. For example, Trimet MAX appears to have road crossings, but SkyTrain never does. Unlike Trimet MAX, SkyTrain is completely separated from any pedestrian/vehicle areas. This means that SkyTrain vehicles can move much faster without having to risk an accidental collision with a stray child or a drunk driver.

I think that’s what classifies SkyTrain as rapid transit as opposed to light rail. Subway is also a form of rapid transit, albeit underground. The problem is there’s know current categorization for rapid transit that is not a subway.

I’m hoping in the long run it will be a good thing. Even now, I’ve seen quite a few good changes from maps.me users, but also a large number of shitty changeset descriptions (e.g. “Edits via MAPS.ME app, a partial upload”) and strange map notes.

The RU:Key:wood proposal seems reasonable (though in practice things like “start date” are normally only known to the people logging the area to begin with, and things like forest age can be difficult to know). It would be nice if it could be translated to English.

We don’t neglect to add difficult mountain-biking routes just because not everyone is a good mountain biker.

In fact, I strongly suspect that neglecting to put faint trails on maps may cause people to misread their maps when they come upon these trails. As Sanderd17 said, just tag appropriately (I think trail_visibility is the most relevant here).

I think deleting a defined path is a bad idea because someone might go map it again without realizing why it was removed. If there is a trail that is closed, and it’s not really a place that anyone should or would go regardless of their technical skill, removing the “highway” key, or changing it to “disused:highway” seems better to me, and then future mappers will be able to see why it’s not displayed on the map.

It’s a little unfortunate that openstreetmap.org doesn’t care about the value of SAC scale when rendering paths.

It seems to have been recreated: osm.org/changeset/34336415

Some offer places to sit, and in any case, you’re supposed to consume it rather quickly (unlike typical shops where you take the goods home before using them).

It is not at all uncommon for a place in Canada to offer take-home products as well as ones to consume immediately.

Mountain regions are filled with landslides and very small seasonal streams. It’s very difficult to differentiate between them. What is the correct way to map them?

It’s hard to tell unless you’ve been there, and even there’s no clear rules. If creek-bed is dry during the summer, I will usually go with natural=scree for the creek-bed and waterway=stream & intermittent=yes for the line where the water would go.

I usually don’t map streams unless I’ve:

• been there myself
• the presence of water is quite visible on from imagery (in which case, it might be a river)
• or I have some other supporting evidence (i.e. the stream exists in government maps)

There’s a fair bit that is difficult to tell from satellite imagery. How intermittent it is is the main one, as you mentioned. It’s also possible that the stream might go under a boulder field, and be essentially “underground”.

In the Himalayas, you often have lots of loose soil, which results in very distinct angles in the landscape, which makes it easy to see where the water would go. In many places, the valley bottoms are a lot harder to see.

As far as I know, there’s no good tag for a canoe launch.

+1

The wood/forest and path/foot path distinction were pretty arbitrary. I am glad to see them go. I like the new colors/icons as well.