because the meaning of a certain design (like the pattern for natural=sand + wetland=tidalflat) is not documented anywhere

The map legend doesn’t currently show area colours at all - that’s something I’ve been wanting to add for a while. In this case (see here - actually relatively few of that combination) the two yellow colours mean sand and beach, and blue dots mean “tidal”, as opposed to black meaning “non-tidal”. I’m familiar with the ones off Portmeirion, and that representation seems reasonable there.

“Your interpretation of different wetland tags also does not seem to fully be as indicated. Example: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5320809 - the tag combination in question, wetland=saltmarsh + surface=mud has world wide 48 occurrences.”

That’s a bug - relation 5320809 is in my database as “landuse nil, natural=mud, surface=mud”, which is wrong. It’s a similar bug to this one. When tags are set to conflicting things, you need to decide which should take precedence. Another example is here - should that show as an operational windmill (black) or a historic one (red)? Also see here for similar examples.

Re calculating the scale factor in SQL - I’ll have a look, thanks!

Re “non-natural=wetland wetland, I’ve only had a look at coastal combinations so far, not the more generic query. For tidalflat that’s wetland, saltmarsh, mud, beach, bare_rock, sand; for wet_meadow that’s currently wetland only. Usage without the “main” key happens with some other keys too, such as information, ruins and others.

There’s also potentially more to be done in splitting wetland types up. I process a lot as “normal” wetland:

wetland=bog   	      6681	"normal" wetland.  
wetland=marsh	      2899	"	 "
wetland=peat_bog      442	"
wetland=swamp	      157	"
wetland=fen	      81	"
wetland=seasonal      29	"
wetland=raised_bog    24	"
wetland=string_bog    5		"
wetland=yes	      4		"
wetland=upland_bog    2		"
wetland=tidalflat     2164	Actually, this is mostly mud.  Implies tidal=yes.
wetland=mud	      78	Also mud, also tidal=yes because a lot of water is assumed.
wetland=wet_meadow    1491	can I do meadow but with some blue dots?
wetland=saltmarsh     1359	part green and part blue, with green plants.  It's inherently tidal.
wetland=reedbed	      1262	mostly green, perhaps like saltmarsh but more green? 
wetland=pond	      8		Ignore.  Most are nodes; which renders as a label, which is OK

and some of those might benefit from a slightly different rendering.

For the benefit of anyone who may be stumbling across this, I’ve asked slice0 what evidence there is that e.g. https://osm.mapki.com/history/way/165672226 should be secondary rather than tertiary. I’ve also suggested in fairly strong terms that slice0’s attitude to the rest of the Au community needs to change (see e.g. the profile text at the time of writing and diary entries such as this one and the others.

Best Regards,

Andy (from the DWG)

If anyone wants to contact the DWG directly please email data@openstreetmap.org with a subject line of “[Ticket#2023122210000115] slice0”.

I was literally banned

No - and this is at least the fourth time that I personally have said it - YOU WERE NOT BANNED.

Perhaps if I was to try and convey that message by the means of interpretative dance communication might be more likely to occur? :)

but I have been banned talking about edits by fizzie with this very user

For the avoidance of doubt, the text of https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/15430 is public, and everyone can read what it says. It does not say that.

Addressing just one point from the above:

Data SA says it is a local road

What “Data SA says” is not binding on OpenStreetMap. The definition that OSM uses for “residential” is https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dresidential , and for “unclassified” https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dunclassified . It may be that a certain national/federal or state classification happens to broadly map onto one OSM one, but even in the UK (which was used as a basis for the classifications in OSM) that isn’t 100%.

If you believe that something that should be tagged as X and someone else believes that it should be tagged as Y, you have to be able to talk about it. That isn’t possible if one person says things like “this edit is made up” or “Data SA says…”.

For the avoidance of doubt - you have not been banned from editing. https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/15430 was created 6 days ago and expired 5 days ago. You have made numerous edits during that period so you must know that saying you’ve been “banned” is at best hyperbole.

Both your recent diary entries (including https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/slice0/diary/402981#comments received comments that do not back up the statements your are making - people have made genuinely helpful suggestions to help you understand what is happening and what you ought to consider doing next.

Something that I often say with a DWG hat on to people involved in conflicts in OSM is “ask yourself why this is happening to you”. Most people can edit OSM - and even discuss with other people the best way to do that with a certain amount of rigour - without encountering the problems that you have encountered.

Your response to the comment on https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/144928924 seems at best inappropriate - whenever there are different opinions we have to be able to talk about the reason behind those opinions in order to understand where the other person is coming from. At its heart OpenStreetMap is a community project. We have to be able to work on it together and discuss things with each other to understand the best way to go forward.

Best Regards,

Andy (from OSM’s Data Working Group)

In the UK at least, I’m not sure I’d agree with “… But usually, humans do not go into the fox covert, and it is not a farmed area”.

Most of the examples near me in the UK look like very historic names, and don’t obviously correspond to areas where foxhounds operated in the last 50 years or so (30 years before and 19 years after the hunting ban). They are - at least now - typically small pieces of woodland, and are used pretty much like all small pieces of woodland are - to produce wood. There are or were 3 or 4 packs of foxhounds in the middle of that area, and it’s pretty much devoid of named fox coverts.

Names may be “more available” in the UK because an available source for OSM is the UK OS’ “OpenData StreetView” map layer - that’s where I’ll have got the name for e.g. https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/849949066/history from, and I suspect many others are similar.

Looking at taginfo, there are a few options:

https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=board_game#values

“cafe=board_game” seems to be the most popular. I was surprised not to see more “theme=board game” (there are lots of e.g. “theme=cat”).

Diary entries can’t be deleted, but I can hide it for you if you like :)

I won’t attempt to re-edit the original diary post after so many months, but it’s worth mentioning that some of these issues have now been addressed, for example voting up and down.

Just as a bit of context, according to a local database of changesets, between January 2022 and May 2023 342163 users made a changeset with at least one change in it.

Of those, 173514 were making their first changeset in iD, and 118034 their 2nd changeset in iD. 2 people were making their 100,000th changeset in iD in that period.

Over the life of the project (ish, because changesets weren’t around from day 1 and older non-redacted data was made into “pretend changesets”), 2011005 users made a changeset with at least one change in it.

If you think quality is not a factor in FB Places data, yikes.

“yikes” doesn’t even begin to cover it! Basically, one of the following is presumably the case:

1. the OSM community has misinterpreted the data, and realistically Facebook don’t think that it’s 88% likely that there is a car valeting service operating in the north transept of York Minster.

2. the data is very low quality (in OSM terms) but actually perfectly serviceable for Facebook’s data use, which was to drive potential customers to Facebook.

3. Facebook actually think that this is “high quality data” (in OSM terms) because their view of “quality” does not match OSM’s.

I suspect (but obviously don’t know for sure) that “2” is what is actually going on here. It doesn’t mean that other Overture Maps members don’t have access to better data, just that that has not been made available in this release.

The most important challenge in getting this data into OSM is making sure the place labels in Overture have an equivalent in OSM.

No, the biggest challenge is to make sure that the data proposed to be added isn’t utter garbage. See the discussion in the forum thread at https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/overturemaps-org-big-businesses-osmf-alternative/6760/271 and elsewhere.

With regard to “what this data was used for”, see the threads at https://en.osm.town/@migurski@mastodon.social/110804743862527535 . It sounds like the FB data was basically used to drive potential customers to Facebook; quality wasn’t really a factor in that. Having a high false positive rate wasn’t a problem with that use case; some people just got (even) more spam from Facebook than they might have done otherwise.

There is a “confidence rating” in the released data, but a quick test shows that not to be especially helpful. at that location (York Minster, a large cathedral dating from the 1200s).

The POI for York Minster appears with a confidence of about 0.9, but unfortunately so does a statue (which exists, but not in that location) and a childcare facility (that certainly does not exist there either). A car valeting company appears with a “confidence” of about 0.88. I have never seen cars being cleaned in the north transept.

There may be some benefit in using some of this data as an “aide to survey”, but it certainly isn’t any use for e.g. maproulette or (heaven help us) some “AI” attempt at adding data, which would simply come up with plausible OSM tags for something that simply does not exist.

@pitscheplatsch Excellent, thanks! Although of course some “reverts” (for example in my case https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1731217800/history ) is just tracking data as it changes.

Just to expand on what SK53 said above:

One of the key discoveries for me was that to understand the issues you absolutely need to survey in-person, arguably in or with one of the vehicles that you’re surveying access for. Many official “crossings” (while useful for cyclists) weren’t great for mobility scooters because if turning circle or camber issues - dropped kerbs where private driveways exited were much more useful. Another was that gates designed to deter cyclists but permit wheelchairs didn’t work for all mobility scooters (turning circle again).

Another, related to turning circle issues was that knowing width was important. More more on this, see the tagging list thread here and other related threads at around that time with the same posters in them.

Finally my general takeaway was that the overall quality and detail of mapping required to be useful for wheelchair and mobility scooter routing was significantly higher than what most people just “mapping sidewalks separately” (or not) are doing. A logical way to capture this sort of information would be expanding on what e.g. StreetComplete do now - but it’d need a level of expertise about the problem that apps like that are designed not to need.

Looks like information=route_marker has a few more uses

Yes, I was surprised to see that “information=route_marker” tends to be used for this (albeit for a few values only), as that doesn’t really match it’s normal meaning. I’d be tempted to make up a new value for these, but like you I’m surprised that other examples in the US aren’t already mapped as something else.

Taginfo suggests there aren’t that many mapped so far, but information=trail_register seems sensible to me!

They aren’t as much of a thing in England (though leaving details where you’re staying about where you’re going and when you’re expected back are).

I think it’s destructive to remove runways mapped as lines and I think this idea should go through a formal proposal first.

I absolutely agree with this comment. It’s easy to calculate the length of a runway from a line but impossible from an area.

Taginfo suggests a number of consumers for aeroway=runway, so I’d suggest discussing this more widely - perhaps at https://community.openstreetmap.org/ , and also contacting data consumers listed at taginfo (there will be at least a github project listed for each) to point them to the community discussion.

However, if someone was to add a polygon area:aeroway=runway around an existing linear aeroway=runway then clearly no data would be lost.

Perhaps I wasn’t clear about my second example - it is clearly not a hedge.

However, generally speaking you’re correct - things such as way 1086001254 is currently tagged in OSM as a hedge, but is surely mistagged. Bing and Maxar imagery there suggest different bits of woodland (perhaps some broadleaved and some needle-leaved). Rather then guess from imagery I’ve left a number of these for future survey.

When i was looking at the “alleged hedge areas sorted by area” in the UK and Ireland yesterday I didn’t see many that looked like scrub - most were some either obviously fields (which I fixed), genuine large hedges or sort of woodland (which I left).