I found out what one of them means: SOHO:
"SOHO is an abbreviation for Small Office Home Office. Soho is a residence like a apartment or house which is equipped with various office facilities. Residential owners have legal permission to use the house or its cement as a residential unit or as an office unit.

In short, Soho is a place that has a dual function, namely as a residence and office which is useful for doing various jobs at home. The types of professions that use Soho a lot are architects, writers, designers, chefs, photographers, and so on" - https://www.arsitag.com/article/mengenal-konsep-soho

So perhaps the A, B, C are other "types" of house as well.

My guess was that these letters had some other sort of meaning, possible. Maybe something about the type of building? I didn't want to entirely remove possible information. But if no one has fixed these notes in the past 4 years, it would be good to delete them now

Oh it looks like you also downgraded Nabire and Merauke at the same time. Eastern Indonesia is a sparsely populated region with few towns and cities. Cities here may be smaller than in other parts of Indonesia

Why did you change Wamena to a place=town in this changeset?

It is inappropriate to map this entire area (most of the Marble Mountain Wilderness) as woodland, while much of it is wooded, there are large ares of bare rock, scrub, grass and many lakes. Please remove this, and map smaller areas which actually correspond to the areas of trees only.

Re: using landuse=recreation_ground for tennis courts.

A landuse=recreation_ground is "An open space for general recreation”, basically a British term for a type of park that is focused on sports pitches. It is not normally used like this to map a couple of tennis courts.

Re: osm.org/way/987279498 and adjacent short highway=track features - are you sure these are roads? They don’t look much different from the other rows of trees. See e.g. ESRI World Imagery Clarity (Beta) here osm.org/edit?way=987279498#map=19/39.12814/-122.23067 - there is a row of trees where this “road” is.

According to the historic=citywalls wiki page: "A citywall is a fortification used to defend a city or settlement from potential aggressors.” This tag is also used for “existing city walls that are ruined, maybe with only foundations remaining”.

It is not normally used to map things which no longer exist (see osm.wiki/Good_practice#Don.27t_map_historic_events_and_historic_features).

There are no other cases where historic=citywalls is used with type=multipolygon to map the entire area of a historic walled town. When mapped as an area, normally this tag is used to map the actual shape of the existing wall (though it is much more common to map the centreline of the wall instead). You can see all examples which are mapped as type=multipolygon areas here: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/12YQ

Yes, I actually talked to the guys who invented that tag. I think it’s not necessary to add the part “facility:” since an MRI is not really a facility but a device, like a CT machine, ultrasound or x-ray device.

Re: Marine Parks. Like protected areas on land, these are legal entities which only exist because a government says that they do (though on land there might be some signs at main roads entering the area), so it is somewhat reasonable to resort to government documents or databases to map them. This means that the data in OpenStreetMap about marine parks or any protected area cannot really hope to improve on the government database, but at best it might immitate it. Similarly local administrative boundaries are also defined by the government and often not very visible on the ground, but at least we usually have an official source to add them.

Toponyms like the names of villages or valleys or mountain ranges are different: they are created by local people due to human’s cultural desire to give names to places. They are not defined by a government, but by how people use the name. We can’t import and area from a government database because there is no official boundary.

OpenStreetMap is not like Wikipedia, where “facts” are based on things that have been published by authorities, and “original research” is a no-no. We map what actually exists in the real world, and “original research” by surveying locations in person is our gold standard.
The problem with description in the link is that it depends on definiting the size and location of a number of other named features, e.g.: "bounded by Kedumba Walls along the east, the cliffs south of Wentworth Falls, Leura and Katoomba, Narrow Neck Plateau and Ruined Castle Ridge to the west and along the south by Mount Solitary and a line from The Col to Kedumba Pass.” While a cliff can be pretty well defined by a line and some ridges can be mapped as lines, a plateau can get very iffy unless it is surrounded by cliffs. And then we have "a line from The Col to Kedumba Pass” which is arbitrary. If you visit the area in person, will all the locals agree on how to map this?

This is an excellent example of why mapping valleys as rough areas is not verfiable to be true or false. Take a look: osm.org/way/889441949#map=12/-34.7340/150.5808&layers=C - is this mapping the floor of the valley, or the top of the hills on each side, or somewhere midway up the slopes? Why does the vally stop just before the reservoir to the left instead of continuing downstream further? It is not possible to get local people to agree on if a valley is only the flat area at the bottom, or if it includes part of the surrounding hills, or goes all the way to the top of the ridge. It's also usually not possible to decide where it ends on the open side, in this case where river flows out.
Also osm.org/889441951#map=12/-33.7948/150.3553&layers=C shows similar problems - why doesn't it cross the river/reservoir to include the part just across to the south? How far up the hills should it go?
Instead if you map a node at the center of each of these valleys, that can be confirmed to actually be in the valley. Cartographers can use the contour lines or a DEM (digital elevation model) to estimae the size of the valley more precisely than these rough sketches, if needed for label placement for example.
- Joseph Eisenberg

ArizonaMapper,
Thanks for working on adding features in this area.

Some of the wood areas don’t seem very accurate. The areas include roads, houses, areas of bushes (natural=scrub), grass (landuse=meadow) and so on, for example way 846943946 (osm.org/way/846943946)
I know from experience that mapping natural vegetation can get rather tedious, but I would recommend going slowly and being careful about precision. For example, I’ve been fixing some of the orchards in this same area which I mapped a couple of years ago when I didn’t care too much about being accurate, and it’s a lot of work to fix now. Probably I would have saved time by mapping fewer things more carefully.

Hi LukeZ, thank you for helping to map Dekai. It’s fun to do this, because there was no map of this town before a couple of years ago when I visited and added some roads by GPS, and now we have good aerial imagery!

Hi LukeZ.

You added way 885529513 (osm.org/way/885529513) as a bridge in this changeset, but I don’t see a bridge on the latest Maxar imagery, and there was no bridge when I visited this area 3 years ago. Where did you see the bridge?

Apakah jalan raya ini sudah ditutup selama proses rekonstruksi, atau masih bisa dipakai oleh masyarakat?

Is this road closed entirely for reconstruction, or is it still possible to drive on it?

I see you added osm.org/way/684682335 with the name Elkhorn Ridge a few months ago. Looking at the old and current USGS maps it looks like the name Elkhorn Ridge is only used for the southeastern portion. Do you have a source that confirms if htis name can also be applied from the section to the northwest? I’ve cut this off into 2 new ways: 884504461 and 884504460, where there are physical differences in the ridges. Please add back the name if you have a good source for it.

So in this area you are mapping the individual dunes as natural=ridge + landform=dune_system? But I though the dune_system tag was for areas. Would it make more sense to add a qualifier to natural=ridge, like natural=ridge + ridge=dune? Or alternately you could use natural=dune to map individual dunes. See osm.wiki/Tag:natural%3Ddune
If hte issue is rendering, we could certainly propose something for natural=dune at http://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto once the tagging is clarified.

egmont,

What does landform=dune_system ean to you when you add it in these areas? I notice it is always combined with natural=ridge or natural=sand.

Re: "That was the reason we started removing the smaller estuaries from the coastline, so edits to them would show up on the map in a timely fashion”

I’m sorry that the coastline updating process is often broken. It’s unfortunate that managing the coastline polygons is complex and can often be stopped by mistakes around the world.

However, that is not a good reason for incorrectly mapping parts of the sea as natural=water, the tag for lakes and rivers. Pamlico sound is a coastal lagoon with salinity only a little lower than that of the open ocean: according to Wikipedia it’s 20 ppm instead of the 35 ppm of the open Atlantic. This is higher salinity than the Black Sea or the Baltic sea, which are clearly part of the sea. Pamlico sound has large passageways to the open ocean and is strongly influenced by tides and ocean water flow in from the open sea.

It is comperable to Galveston Bay which also has barrier islands, and is mapped with natural=coastline appropriately. Pamlico Sound is also comperable to the coastal waters of the northern Netherlands and NW Germany, which are mapped as being outside of the coastline (see openstreetmap.de where different colors clearly show the distinction - I’ve also worked on showing this on openstreetmap.org but the PR hasn’t been accepted yet).
- Joseph Eisenberg