OpenStreetMap
Since April 2008, the German road tagging page
osm.wiki/index.php/De:Germany_roads_tagging
was changed in the way that the refs shall contain spaces now, e.g. A7 shall be written as A 7 now. This might be the correct official notation but it is not consistent with the refs in other countries and also not consistent with the main OSM tagging page (this will, e.g., confuse a newbie badly).
The problem is now that some people try hard to modify existing highways to include the spaces in the refs. Since highways are usually not consisting of just one segment (because of bridges, tunnels, etc.), one has to exchange the ref of all the segments. What I see now is that most segments of a highway were changed but some are not. I see that in some regions there are more spaces, in others are no at all. My opinion to this is that we should not use spaces because this is the way it is done in other countries and this will keep a consistent OSM map.
Recently, somebody has done this "random correction of refs in highway segments" in the area where I did most of the existing mapping. As a consequence, the refs in this area look now very ugly which I do not like at all.
My personal consequence out of this is that I will not tag any new highway I create with a "ref" tag anymore...
Discussion
Awennit n randomjunk di 7 June 2008 ɣef 10:01
Germany is a different country, it hasn't different refs. Other countries write their refs without spaces... this was copied into OSM ref tags. If Germany always uses spaces then that's the way the ref tags should be. The intermediate stage of people correcting old ones is obviously annoying.
If someone wants to produce a consistant map across countries then they can pre-process the data before rendering it.
As for not tagging highway refs because of this, that doesn't help anyone.
Awennit n randomjunk di 7 June 2008 ɣef 10:04
that should read "has different refs" not "hasn't"
Awennit n corrados di 7 June 2008 ɣef 10:19
I guess you are right, I'll rethink what I wrote in my last sentence...
Awennit n Paxton di 7 June 2008 ɣef 14:51
Maybe it is possible to let the server do all replacements?
Awennit n Pixel83 di 7 June 2008 ɣef 18:52
A simple regular expression should be able to do that, since all refs have the same pattern. (1-2 letters, optional space, integer)
Maybe one could run an automated job right before the osmarender process?
Awennit n corrados di 8 June 2008 ɣef 09:59
> Maybe one could run an automated job right before the osmarender process?
That would be my favourite solution to the problem. In this case we would get a consistent map.
Awennit n ColinMarquardt di 8 June 2008 ɣef 23:06
There have been several fixbot runs in the past, this certainly could be something for a new run: osm.wiki/index.php/User:Frederik_Ramm/Fixbot_Log
Awennit n corrados di 9 June 2008 ɣef 10:08
Thanks for that hint, I've written a mail to Frederik.