One place where this could be useful is in the US, where there are large “National Forest” parks that have the unfortunate landuse=forest tag on them, even though they’re only partly forests. Some editors want the landuse=forest to stay because they don’t want to see the green go away. This data, even if the quality is poor, might be better than the current state.

I think the man_made tag is a little unfortunate. There are a lot of man made things that don’t use it, and in actuality it’s just a dumping ground for things that people can’t make a better scheme for.

Certainly an animal made feature that is reasonably permanent and prominent deserves a place in OSM. One problem is that a lot of features that animals leave aren’t very permanent. The other problem is that surveys tend to take place in places that are regularly tracked by humans. Animals usually avoid humans, and so a lot of such discoveries are likely to be made in places that have either 1) recently scene human intrusion, and the animals are on their way out or 2) are in places where surveys would be very uncommon and the data will be out-of date really quickly.

As for tagging a riparian forest, just use natural=wood, and tag the respective waterway too. The fact that it’s beside a river/lake/etc is really all that it needs to be riparian.

If you have time to do a detailed survey, then in some cases, there are often small areas that could be tagged with wetland=wet_meadow, wetland=marsh, or wetland=swamp; however, a wetland isn’t just ground that regularly gets puddles on it, it should be land that is always (or almost always) waterlogged. Usually different kind of vegetation thrives in wetland that does on regular land.

What’s the difference between forestry & logging?

I looked into it using the Bing API directly and it looks like there actually is a 7 year approximation for the image capture date.

You can check out the supposed current date of that area using the Bing imagery analyzer for OSM by Martijn van Exel link to area. That indicates the current ones where taken between December 2009 and September 2016, I think. 7 years is a hell of an approximation, so I may be reading that wrong. Also, I don’t think it’s possible to find the date of the old imagery.

I also recall a diary entry a bit ago indicating that bing was apparently updating its imagery in some places, but it seems strange that it would update it with older imagery.

The “highway kinks” check that TO-FIX does would catch that, since Wood Lane is very kinked. Off course it won’t catch short accidental drags, bug I don’t think that’s practical to catch.

I found the area you where describing with the OSM History Viewer. That area does look a little like it used to be a ski area. I’m not sure why InfiNorth deleted it. Maybe send them a message or comment on the changeset.

I see, I probably can’t be of much help at the moment, but you may have luck contacting members of ACC Vancouver Island

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.