Paul, the fact that you might have traced a couple of streets from StreetView once isn't going to prevent you from agreeing. Remember that if it later turns out that we can't keep the OS data after all, then it'll have to be removed whether you agree to the CTs or not, so don't factor it into your decision. All this bollocks about OpenData meaning people can't sign up is exactly that - bollocks.

Just to comment - many UK contributors have clicked decline because of the continuing uncertainty about the use of anything that might plausibly be a derivative of the Opendata from Ordnance Survey.

Unfortunately, yes, some people really are that possessive over their data.

Also remember that Bing is sometimees misaligned and out of date (anywhere between 3 and 11 years in my area), and GPS traces may also be outdated. There are different opinions on remote mapping, but the one thing most people would agree on is that if you don't know what you're looking at, deleting and retracing stuff really isn't a good idea. It's fine to do things like this if you've personally resurveyed the area and found a big enough difference to make it worthwhile, but don't do it with random other users just for the sake of writing them out of history.

As has been stated already, many have clicked on decline because they had to click on something. And in case anyone's thinking of making a big deal of this, around 150 people have actually hit the decline button, and some of these have since accepted. On the other hand, some 12000 have accepted. I figure that the vast majority of active contributors have faced the click-wall already.

At the end of the day, we're a project that collects and distributes data. If we have to lose some data, we'll just collect it all over again. Remember that we need to resurvey from time to time in any case. We're not working to a deadline - our product is a living artefact.

My tactic for dealing with this is to wait until it's needed, and leave it to someone who knows what they're doing. I expect that's the same tactic most others will use too.

That stinks of the kind of commercial bureacracy that FSF, GPL, and CC were formed to prevent and fight against.

How dare they sneak this up on us. I mean, it's absolutely disgraceful that we've only had around four years' notice of a potential change, and that most of the discussion was limited to open forums that any contributor can be a part of. It's not even like it's been put to a vote, apart from that one carried out by the Foundation (which only anyone can be a part of), and this one being offered right now.

The sheer cheek of it ...

If people are using relations to share ways between polygons, they're doing it wrong. Two buildings with a shared wall are two polygons, not three ways and two relations.

Bye Liz. Mind the door as you leave.

What do you know, the sky didn't fall down after all ...

As with any large project, time to completion tends to a constant which is not always zero. We may well end up reaching the point where we are permanently 42 days to completion. Always useful to have a salt cellar handy when daling with these figures.

It may be that the road is Eastgate while the addresses are High Street. Wouldn't be the first place where the street addresses differ from the road name. I work in a building where this is the case.

PROTIP: It's a spatial database. That sort of requires that things have a location.

[Slightly less-obvious tip: Flandrensis' land claims are void ab initio.]

You wouldn't. There, that was easy. :o)

I think this is the series that aired last year. If it is, it's well worth watching for anyone with even a passing interest in the subject.

You may not find it impressive, but if someone said to me there were "almost 100 organized groups around the world", I'd be impressed.

Z18 tiles aren't necessarily re-rendered if nobody's looked at them, so they can be a bit behind the times.

That's unfortunate, because the nonsense that goes on at tagging-related pages is precisely the thing that has driven people away in the past, and you're unlikely to win them back unless you put a stop to it. Another brilliant example: Template:No proposal seems to encourage the creation of proposal pages for tags that are documented and in use.

Part of the problem is that we seem to have a group of idiots that think the wiki should be used as a venue for tag bureaucracy, and another group of idiots that won't bother with it because of the first group. A prime example is the designation tag. A "proposal" has lingered for a year and a half, and in that time the tag has entered common use - yet someone is now suggesting that we proceed with the utterly pointless and futile exercise of a formal vote (you couldn't action a "no" vote at this stage).

The former group need to accept that the wiki is for documentation - description, not prescription. Only once they're dealt with are you going to get the latter group into the fold.

Personally, for NSL roads I tag the explicit number, if only because it's impossible to determine with any certainty what that would be from the data alone. A way tagged oneway=yes may be 30, 60 or 70mph, depending on stuff we can't reliably detect. A "restricted road" (30mph) is one where there is street lighting to a certain standard which lit=yes doesn't tell us (unless people are going to measure the spacing and tag them lit=45m or somesuch). A one-way road may be part of a dual carriageway, or it may not - consider the ring road in Stourbridge or the Redditch Ringway. IIRC, neither of these is actually NSL, so they should be tagged explicitly anyway, but it illustrates the difficulty of trying to detect which category a road should belong in. Then there are added complications involving motorways and the like - the A1 east of the Edinburgh Ring Road is explicitly signed as 70mph because it is not subject to the NSL (mostly an accident of history).

I don't buy the argument about the government changing the NSL, since local authorities can change speed limits in any case (my local authority in the last couple of years downgraded a lot of previously NSL roads to 40mph). source:maxspeed seems like a good idea, since this allows the combined cases of the government changing the NSL, and the fact that different vehicle types have different speed limits - e.g. HGVs limited to 40mph on single-carriageway roads.

There's also Nominatim, which powers the search on the slippy map. It has some oddities, like thinking that the Palace of Westminster is in Hertfordshire, or that Tonyrefail is a suburb of Swansea in the Vale of Glamorgan (a two-step fail on that one), but depending on the quality of boundary data it should be able to get a rough fix on most locations. Just be careful with politically-sensitive locations - we don't want to be putting Nicaraguan troops in Costa Rica again.