I am using Osmose to find and fix polygon errors in Ireland. I fixed a problem in a golf course in Youghal, Co. Cork. I could have stopped there, and moved on, however the JOSM validator found some errors, so I kept working on that little area. This led me to spot some not great mapping around a school. Some houses tagged with name=Residential Dwelling, that kind of thing. I cleaned up the area. Removed unneeded name tags, fixed tagging of roads etc. I found the mapper, and changeset where this was added, and was able to leave a changeset comment on it. I’m not the first to notice, but maybe this mapper might return to OSM.

So I feel like I have improved the map in this area. I would not have known to look there if I hadn’t use a QA tool like Osmose, or the JOSM Validator. However if I was just looking at closed polygons, then I would have stopped as soon as I fixed that polygon, and moved on.

At State of the Map 2016, Frederik Ramm talked about Mechanical Edits, and one problem he finds with mechanical edits is that sometimes people just mechanically and automatically fix the problem that the QA tool has found, rather than looking at the area, or other contributions from the same mapper, and try to fix the larger problem, and fix other problems. There is often talk about more automatic and manual imports, with some suggesting that humans are expensive, let’s not use them too often. But you need to have humans there, to find and recognise other mistakes which the tool can miss, as my example shows.