Changeset: 47853718
Enforced convention of calling a suburb a suburb rather than a town, to ensure that Nominatim reverse-geotags points in the areas correctly. Deleted "Manor Park, Streatham" suburb and introduced "City of London" suburb at Bank. Budged a few markers a bit.
Closed by Pyorot
Tags
created_by | iD 2.1.3 |
---|---|
host | https://www.openstreetmap.org/id |
imagery_used | Bing aerial imagery |
locale | en-GB |
Discussion
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Comment from chillly
This is a controversial mass edit by a recently-joined editor. I think this needs to be discussed before such a change. I suggest this is reverted.
Why have you made such a change? (Please reply - we need to understand what you are doing)
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Comment from Derick Rethans
Hi, and welcome to OpenStreetMap. I see you're a new mapper (5 edits), and you've decided to change town/suburb classfications around London. This is a controversial move, and should have been discussed on the talk-gb and talk-gb-london mailinglist first.
cheers,
Derick -
Comment from SK53
Revision of place tags on London suburbs MUST be discussed beforehand. The current values represent a consensus of mappers and users over the past 12+ years. I have reverted this and your 4 similar changesets.
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Comment from Pyorot
Hi, thanks for describing your policy.
I made the changes in order to make the map work with OSM's Nominatim service. This is an API that takes coordinates as input and returns addresses. Suburbs of London labelled as towns *do not get returned* by Nominatim, presumably because it trumps them with city = London. This means that a nearby suburb is given (e.g. Hanwell instead of Ealing), no info is given (Greenwich) or a non-suburb is given (Brook Green instead of Hammersmith). My changes relabelled towns as suburbs and, for a while, Nominatim was giving much more reliable info. Not anymore!
I did not believe (and still don't, really) that these decisions are based on consensus since there is no consistency between towns/suburbs and certain regions labelled as suburbs are obviously not suburbs ("West Kensington Park"?). This is what prompted me to make my bold edit. But do let me know where I can read discussions.
Anyway, please let me know how this problem shall be dealt with. I joined OSM in order to fix this problem with how Nominatim works in London, to improve the accuracy of locations returned by my geolocating bot.
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Comment from SK53
Thank you. I know perfectly well what Nominatim is: the current maintainer is a friend.
For this sort of issue you should be filing issues on the Nominatim github pages https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim/issues. I suspect that the issue is known, but we have too few developers and maintainers to resolve such problems.
Nominatim is just one of thousands of applications consuming OSM data; there is a well understood rule of editing OSM data "Don't edit for the Renderer" (and this applies to routing software, geocoders etc). For instance by changing these nodes you probably break the searches on Garmin devices which use the same data.
Lastly, "be bold" is a wikipedia policy not generally one advocated for OSM. Consensus is valued: and when thousands if not millions of people have been able to use the data without changing it that implies a very substantial consensus. Additionally your edits were discussed by a small number of experienced editors, and the view was that given the significance of the changes it was important to revert them quickly before corrections were made piecemeal. Normally we like to give the original editor a chance to discuss their edits before doing a reversion. In this case the next person to notice the accidental substitution of suburb for Ilford would have made restoring the original data rather more complex.
That is not to say that there may not be oddities: it's best to highlight these using the notes feature. See for example this note http://www.openstreetmap.org/note/547502#map=15/51.4096/-0.1310&layers=N
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Comment from Pyorot
I deduced based on the fact that Nominatim doesn't return town info in London and based on the usage info given here (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:place%3Dsuburb ; http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:place%3Dtown) that suburbs in Greater London should be tagged "suburb" and not "town" without exception, and that the reason there were random exceptions was that nobody had bothered to enforce the change. There is not necessarily a problem in Nominatim.
I would consider the fact that "thousands if not millions of people have been able to use the data without changing it" to be idleness, rather than consensus, particularly in light of your sentence "For instance by changing these nodes you probably break the searches on Garmin devices which use the same data.", as no other reason is given for not enforcing the change.
The fact that the edits were reverted immediately rather than being discussed is reasonable to me.
Either way, I won't bother using Nominatim if it gives low-quality information and fixing it involves submitting dubious issue reports or opening discussions on the status of every "town" in London and on every obviously-fake suburb. I don't have the patience to engage in a discussion on the town/suburb convention and will leave my point here. Thanks for reading.
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Comment from Pyorot
Actually, sorry, I forgot to mention that part of the reason I'm put off from engaging in discussions is that your note gives an example of such a discussion that took over a year to close.
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Comment from SK53
We do have an important principle in OSM: respect for fellow contributors. You are distinctly failing to show that respect to me or others. Quite frankly I think we are better off without your arrogant attitude and unwillingness to collaborate.
The reason why the note has not been cleared is that someone has not made the journey to S. London to check if "Lonesome" is signed or otherwise visible on the ground. We value actual real surveys which can be checked by others. Contrary to your opinion this is a strength, not a weakness of OSM.
Please let me assure you that any further changes you make with respect to place nodes will be referred to the Data Working Group.
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Comment from Pyorot
You think it's arrogant to not engage in a discussion? Do you have infinite time? Or did you take my characterisation of the state of suburbs as "idleness" personally?
Either way, your accusation of disrespect and arrogance, bundled with the mischaracterisation of my opinion, use of the word "assure", and random threat, is quite ironic.
RE Lonesome: it seems that it was closed because someone cited it with an article.
Nodes (1-20 of 34)
- 1
- 2
- City of London (4797567223), v1
- Chiswick (27529289), v12
- Brixton (21521237), v8
- Woolwich (748823935), v7
- Greenwich (27365302), v10
- Clapham (27554267), v11
- Dalston (27365025), v9
- Kilburn (1569016949), v8
- Shepherd's Bush (21662002), v9
- Richmond (21099164), v11
- Tooting (4001592824), v2
- Streatham (21521238), v6
- Camden Town (399607277), v11
- Wood Green (27365052), v7
- Walthamstow (27365050), v6
- suburb (597413690), v6
- East Ham (3942034573), v4
- Barking (26422736), v6
- Lewisham (27365305), v10
- Catford (13878144), v10
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