@Sanderd17: Good for you! As I’ve alread said above: there is certainly more than one way to map it. But this was indeed about the issue of Stéphane Brunner imposing his point of view without consulting with anybody.

@Malenki: Until last year’s case that went public, I tried to find agreements with Stéphane Brunner. But quite frankly, I’m a bit tired of watching him having his way with my contributions and having to plead and argue with him after he presented me with a fait accompli, only to have him to lecture me why he is right and I am wrong. In this case, he thinks he is right, because according to him, putting a name on a service highway constitutes “Tagging for the renderer”. How do you argue that kind of “logic”?

@Pink Duck: I completely agree with you that the situation is ambiguous, and there is certainly more than one way to map it. But this is not my point.

Since I have started mapping in 2010, it happened again and again that Stéphane Brunner felt compelled to “correct” and “improve” information that I had just freshly put on the map, making sure to have everything “his way” and at best notifying my after the fact, not to seek an agreement, but to lecture me about “my error”. That’s what this is about. And yes, he is aware of it since I also brought it up on the Swiss mailing list.

@Pink Duck: To use a practical example, we’re not talking about a driveway up to a single house, but about a situation like in the Chemin de Montéclard in Epalinges, where it’s hard to tell where the street ends and the driveway begins. As you can see in my example, in Bing almost every single driveway has a name label, which is much more than I provided.

And of course you can discuss whether it is usual or necessary to give driveways a name, but I couldn’t find an argument or reason why it would be wrong to provide this information, especially under the forementioned circumstances.

I consider Stéphane Brunner’s behaviour as arrogant, rude and jerkish. He really seems to think that this is “his” map, and I doubt that he will change his behaviour without some feedback from the community.

@Genscher: My personal experiences with Mr. Brunner aside, to say that he "is worsening" the map would not do justice to his positive contributions.

As far as I am aware, Mr. Brunner has contributed a copious amount of (new) information by tracing aerial images in and around Lausanne and has probably already contributed more to OSM than I ever will. My ambitions are far more modest. I only map areas and places that I know and care about. And most of all, I am doing this for fun. So with regard to Mr. Brunner's undisputed merits in mapping the area around Lausanne, I decided to withdraw from that area to avoid further conflict and to allow Mr. Brunner to have things looking whichever way it pleases him and based on whatever data sources seem trustworthy to him.

Of course everybody should map the way they feel it's appropriate. But that's not my point. My point is that I took the time to go out with my GPS and my mountain bike. I wanted to complete, correct and refine some tracks, paths and landcover in a certain area that was only roughly traced with satellite maps and had lots of unconnected and incomplete ways.

And in this situation, I find it quite frustrating, when another guy in front of his computer screen decides based on outdated satellite maps (which do have an offset and show the tree cover in winter -> decidous trees are barely visible) how things should look like. So I have withdrawn my GPX traces from that area and I'll leave him to his wisdom. Apparently an armchair and an old satellite map is all that Mr. Brunner needs to do "his work".

@Sundance: Well, depending how you see it, roads do run through forests (as do rivers) and tracks are often at the border of forests, fields or meadows and separate two of those areas.

In OSM, roads are usually represented as a line, which is of course a rough, but quite useful approximation. So if you have a field on one side of the road, and a forest on the other, it is way more convenient for subsequent editing to use only one line instead of juggling with three lines that you have to keep parallel.

I agree with your idea of increasing the level of detail. But given the offsets of various maps and the precision of GPX traces, there are limits to the absolute detail that is possible. At some point, it comes down to aesthetic preferences.

And in a situation, where there is plenty of opportunity to increase the detail all over the place, it feels a bit weird, if a user chooses to stalk you and "improve" your contributions. Under such circumstances, I prefer to map in areas where my paths don't cross Mr. Brunner's. That's all.

Our disagreement is basically about whether areas with landuse=* can and should go across a way with highway=* and whether you can and should use a way with highway=* as border element of a multipolygon with landuse=* or if a road needs to have some physical space to its left and its right.

I think the first way of doing it is simpler for moving and correcting nodes of the road (you don't have to worry about keeping two other lines to the left and right in parallel) and allows for a cleaner rendering without white spaces. Now I can also accept the validity of Mr. Brunners perspective of representing the reality of physical space to the left and right side of the road. Here it needs to be said that Mr. Brunner has great merits in tracing satellite and aerial images, and he has created himself a large amount of areas and multipolygons that do not correspond to his own ideal of physical space to the left and right side of the road.

If he would start "improving" his own contributions first, I would be much more inclined to accept his "improvements" on my contributions. But the way it is, it feels more like having some know-it-all breathing down my neck, and it's just no fun to work this way.

It's not the first time that we had this disagreement, but this time, things went a bit too far and got out of hand.

Here are his first two change sets:
osm.org/browse/changeset/9156557
osm.org/browse/changeset/9160703

Here is my reversion:
osm.org/browse/changeset/9162875

Here is his rereversion:
osm.org/browse/changeset/9165951