Hello,

There are a couple of discussions on the tagging list that you might be interested in: this one and this one (and see the links from there to the wiki articles). Please do join in there to contribute to how OSM records all sorts of different borders.

Best Regards,

Andy

@Glassman Well I’m in the DWG - is my username random enough? :)

Seriously, just report spam when you see it and move on. We get lots of spam reports already, and yes, you can often figure out the likely culprits by the MO of the people adding them, including time zone. As TomH has said above, where we get a series of linked issues that need further investigation / action beyond “just revert it” we can and do pass details on to the admins.

@kocio Not sure if “you” here is PlaneMad or I, but in my case it’s not really suitable for an OSM Carto ticket since it’s just a way to render one set of OSM Carto borders over another set.

However there is discussion about how best to render disputed borders on the tagging list at the moment - see this list thread et al. Hopefully something will come out of that. Time permitting I’d also like to experiment myself with osmborder or a derivative, and to see what I can do to render “one sided borders” based on that (e.g. if country A’s claim isn’t aligned with country B’s claim and is “inside country B”, then the border should perhaps be one sided to show it “belongs” to country A). There’s lots of experimentation needed before actual code suggestions made though I suspect.

Thanks. The collisions at low zoom I suspect I won’t be able to do anything about. The one on the Dee doesn’t look too bad too my eyes (sorry if that’s heresy!). The one at Nick’i’the hill is a fair cop though - but I don’t think I’d want to supress the place name because of the boundary.

@imagico on the two-stage filtering process, I did that because I didn’t see a way to get osmium to filter tags from objects (which I was surprised about, TBH). The reason why boundary features with those tags are dropped is because I don’t want to have to remove non-boundary rendering from the “other” map style (I did actually try that approach first, but this one was more effective and ultimately easier).

Label collisions are of course a potential issue, but I’ve not actually found one yet!

It’s broken.

(as an example to find who created something like this) I searched taginfo for part of that string and then clicked through to an overpass turbo query on part of Somalia.

As an example, that found this way which was added in this changeset. If you comment there an email will go to the user, but as they haven’t been active in 11 months they may not see your message.

These roads were added 7 years ago, so I suspect that there isn’t a problem with deleting ones that don’t exist in any currently available imagery and don’t have GPS traces backing up their location.

Can you give a specific example? Move the map to where the paths disappeared and paste the URL here. I’ve had a look at a couple of locations around osm.org/#map=15/41.9384/25.8446 and I can’t see any disappearing paths.

There have been some reverts in the area - of poor Corinne Landcover data a couple of years ago (at the request of the local community) and of some name changes in osm.org/changeset/64516990 (likewise).

If you can identify where there were paths before (and also when there were paths) people can look for them.

Best Regards,

Andy

This post contains a few ad-hominem attacks, unsourced accusations and factual errors such as “Warum sammelt wir nicht auch in OSM Spendengeld” (answer - we do; look at the link at the bottom-right of osm.org some time).

You’re edits have been (to use a bit of British understatement) “somewhat controversial”. Have a look at your changeset comments here and the links into the forum from there.

People in OSM occasionally have arguments about how to do something, but when lots of people are suggesting that you’re doing something wrong and you’re the only person supporting your point of view then you really do need to take a step back and try and understand other people’s point of view. If you can’t do that then OSM may not be the project for you - it’s inherently a “people project”, Your interaction with the community has been unnecessarily confrontational - see for example here.

You clearly have an agenda for the sorts of data that you’d like to be added to OSM. That’s OK, everyone does to some extent, and everyone “scratches their own itch”. However if what you’re trying to do would involve adding lots of low-quality data that is likely to directly cause a problem to lots of other people and it’s unsurprising that there have been complaints.

You might want the way that OSM works to change (to move from a “volunteer-surveyor” model to a paid “GIS expert” one). I’m sure that there are people around the world who share some part of that view, and if you want to make it happen you need to win people round to your point of view and lobby the OSMF board (or persuade people to vote for you to join it) . I can guarantee that posts such as the diary entry above will make that less likely, not more likely, to happen.

Best Regards,

Andy (a member of OSM’s Data Working Group. The DWG got involved because this conflict was referred to us, as these things tend to be).

Hello,

There have been a number of issues with users trying to upload data as part of this project, mostly now to do with mispelt and partial tags such as “damage_dat”. See osm.org/node/5983656035 for a recent example. Attempts to get in touch with mappers has mostly failed, so I’m adding this comment here.

As I’ve suggested previously to mappers uploading this data you can see what keys are used for certain things by searching https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/ and osm.wiki/Main_Page . You can also ask questions at https://help.openstreetmap.org/ .

Please do take the time to look for “unusual” keys added by this project and correct them to whatever they should have been in the first place.

Best Regards,

Andy Townsend, from OSM’s Data Working Group

For info, here are the taginfo links for amenity=embassy (11k uses), amenity=consulate (30 uses) and where else consulate is used, including 782 diplomatic=consulate.

Much tagging discussion takes place on the tagging mailing list. Some of the messages there come from people with a deep knowledge of a particular field; some with a lot of familiarity with how OSM tends to tag things. Some there however do seem to overestimate the power of the tagging list (and the wiki) to change the use of tags within OSM - most mappers just use their editor’s presets.

Whilst OSM mostly uses British English tags for things, there are a few exceptions, often related to tags that have become established, or would be confusing if a British English term was used (“sidewalk” is an example of that), so it’s difficult to say that a tag is “wrong” because it doesn’t exactly match the British English usage of a word. An example of the latter is “city” - everywhere in the US that is legally a city there is not tagged as such (see for example Cando in North Dakota). However in cases such as this the wiki should be clear and point out the difference (as the city page does). If pages such as diplomatic=consulate or key:diplomatic contain factual errors about what e.g. consulates do, then please change them, but the “how to use in OSM” part should really reflect usage in OSM, even if that doesn’t match British English usage, unless that usage was agreed to be in error (due to an erroneous import, for example). There has been some “targetted editing” and “tag gardening” of embassies I believe, and I seem to remember at least one directed editing task to “add certain tags to embassies” that didn’t actually check that the things being edited were embassies.

Best Regards,

Andy Townsend (a member of OSM’s Data Working Group)

Just for info, this map shows barriers (and PRoW refs) in that area. I can see a gate, stiles and kissing gates there. If there’s anything else that you’d expect to see that isn’t shown, please let me know!

Personally I wouldn’t assume that “highway=bridleway” implies universal horse access, only that it’s a way designed to be used by horses (among other traffic). You might guess at horse=yes if there’s no access tag added, but you can always add an explicit “horse” tag to make it clear. The converse is sometimes true - the footpaths at osm.org/#map=18/54.21721/-1.04628 are legally bridleways but you’d struggle to fit dobbin through.

I’ve seen towpaths that could qualify as any of highway=footway, bridleway, cycleway, track - it really depends on what it looks like locally.

I’m not sure why everyone seems to be shooting the messenger here :)

Whilst it’s true that that Nominatim can be used to search for relations (in fact most of the time I search for places in OSM I’ll be returned a relation) it’s also true that relations of the type that the author was looking for here won’t be returned by Nominatim (which is fair enough - it’s designed as a place search engine, not a hiking trail search).

Also, Overpass’ wildcard support seems to have been written by Incy Wincy Spider, and using Nominatim to create Overpass queries for you is definitely far easier than trying to remember Overpass’ syntax without crib notes - it’s how I always do searches like this.

All in all I’m sure that this diary entry will be useful to lots of people - I’m not sure why there’s all the negativity.

Whilst it’s great that changesets near and not so near are being reviewed, I wouldn’t equate “Flagged for Review by Mapbox” with “vandalism”, which your graphic above suggests. Even if they’re problematical, most “flagged as vandalism” edits aren’t (for example of the last 6 “vandalism” issues reported to the DWG via the “report” function at an absolute stretch only 3 could be considered “vandalism” - more common reasons are new users trying to get the hang of things, and disagreements over tagging.

Yes - “showground” is British English for what Americans would call “Fairgrounds”. Local ones often less permanent - the nearest one to me is just a field with fancy gates 363 days of the year.

The name of India was recently changed from English to Hindi and back - see https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=706785#p706785 and the rest of that thread for details. It’s possible that you’re seeing a tile with the “old” name in it from a cache somewhere (such as your browser cache).

The isn’t really the fault of OSM Carto - “path” in OSM is a pretty nasty concept. It’s really just “a way of getting from A to B that isn’t wide enough for 4 wheeled transport”. However we are where we are, and its certainly not going away.

“bicycle=designated and foot=designated” just means that two forms of transport are suggested to use that route as opposed to others; it doesn’t tell you anything about what sort of “highway” it is. Personally I’d always try and use a more appropriate highway tag if there is one (does it look like it’s designed for use by bicycles? highway=cycleway, with appropriate access tags. Horses? highway=bridleway, again with appropriate access tags.

You can also use other tags (surface, width, tracktype, smoothness etc.) to try and get the sense across properly.

@b-jazz That comment in that SOTM-US video is clearly meant as and taken as a joke (clue: the audience laughs). I’ve no idea what you said to the SotM-US organisers or what they said to you, but perhaps you need to be a little more open to what other people think - sometimes things are a little more complicated than you might at first think.

Is it usually difficult to come to a local concensus on tagging?

The short answer is “yes”. It can be particularly tricky when there are relatively few mappers in an area, and so less chance to see other people’s views on how best to tag certain sorts of objects. Generally speaking the way to resolve these sorts of issues is to talk about them, but there has to be an amount of give and take - sometimes in OSM discussions there (and I’m thinking of this tagging list thread in particular here) there isn’t.

There currently seems to be a bit of a discussion going on in the forum thread at the moment, but there aren’t that many people there (and especially not many Canadians). The Canadian country forum is also very quiet. There’s a bit more at the talk-ca mailing list; maybe try there?

On the tagging itself, the only other thing that I’d add would be to try and capture as much other information as possible to give renderers a chance of making a decent job of the road regardless of classification (surface, width, that sort of thing).