OpenStreetMap

Richard's Diary Comments

Diary Comments added by Richard

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OWG Must Be Destroyed

Fuck’s sake Ilya, try and be a human being sometimes.

Should you rank all the candidates in the OSMF election?

Can I implore you to come over to Britain and run our electoral system? Like, before Thursday? :(

iD editor: It is time for us to end this abusive relationship

@literan It’s not acceptable for anyone to say “a developer should be a servant of the community”. A developer is a part of the community. It takes mutual respect. There are things in iD, and JOSM, and osm-carto, and osm-website, and pretty much every part of OSM that are not exactly how I’d do them. That does not give me or you or anyone the right to start issuing ultimatums.

iD editor: It is time for us to end this abusive relationship

@ain92, it would perhaps behove you to have a bit more experience in OpenStreetMap than 100 changesets before you start telling long-standing and dedicated contributors what is “unacceptable” and demand that “ultimatums” are issued.

iD editor: It is time for us to end this abusive relationship

Frederik, I think you (and Mikel) could usefully reflect on your role in this - or lack thereof - as OSMF directors. Saying nothing for n years and then firing off a broadside just as you leave office is pretty weak sauce.

Most of this ultimately comes down to the differences (which can be overstated) between “craftmapper” OSM and “corporate” OSM, aka between European OSM and American OSM. Unsurprisingly, if you have an editor which is developed by American programmers employed by large OSM-using corporations, it is going to lean more towards the American/corporate side of things. The fact that the divergences are mostly as minor as “the developers prefer the 1 out of the 500 OSM communications channels I don’t use”, or “the developers have an opinion on tagging, a subject on which no two people ever agree, with which I disagree”, or “the developers load images from servers I don’t like”, suggests they’re doing a good job in the round IMO.

But that’s only my personal view. The point is that OSMF could have done something about it. If OSMF feels that iD is not fully representing the OSM contributor base, then OSMF, which has £££ in the bank, could fund a European maintainer - or, perhaps better, a “community maintainer” - to join Bryan and Quincy. It hasn’t done. As a director, that is your choice by omission.

Maintaining the default editor is not easy. That is something that has been public knowledge since 2013, arguably long before. It is probably unrealistic to expect anyone to work on it without being paid, particularly given the grand tradition of “BAN POTLATCH” postings like this. You are smarter than the Potlatch Banners of yesteryear, not just more articulate, and I am a little disappointed by this posting.

Why are the Adirondack and Catskill Parks labeled 'national_park' ?

You might be interested to know that there is precedent for this in the UK. We tag the Broads as a national_park even though strictly speaking it isn’t quite one. (National Parks in the UK have to abide by the Sandford Principle - “where irreconcilable conflicts exist between conservation and public enjoyment, then conservation interest should take priority” - whereas on the Broads, navigation has equal priority.) But it quacks like a duck, and after I enjoyed cycling through the Catskills a few years ago I can see why you’ve taken the same decision.

Potlatch 2 relation shortcuts

Basically I need to finish the (mostly working) port to AIR, which will enable Potlatch to become a desktop application for Mac and Windows - potentially Linux too but that depends on whether I can keep compatibility with the ancient version of AIR that Adobe released before they EOLed it. AIR has recently been hived off to a company called Harman (a subsidiary of Samsung) and it’s not quite clear what’s happening there, but I think it’s probably got a few more years in it.

Potlatch 2 relation shortcuts

At present P2 doesn’t have release numbers because I can’t remember how the system works (I think Andy set it up and it’s connected with git tags or something). If I have the time to figure it out then I’ll give it a release number but for now it doesn’t have one.

A Stranger at your Table

Justice has no place at their table, and thus neither do I

Bye then.

Potlatch 2 relation shortcuts

Yep:

  • Find a way/node with that selection of tags (create a dummy one if you need to!)
  • Press Shift and that function key
  • From then on, you can press that function key to recall the tags

Pretty much all of my TIGER fixup is done this way - so F1 is ‘layer=1, bridge=yes’, F3 is ‘highway=unclassified, surface=gravel’, and so on.

How to translate OpenStreetMaps to other languages?

Sorry - Google Translate probably isn’t a usable source for OSM. The algorithms they use for translation are copyright Google and it’s very likely that some Google-tainted data finds its way into the results. If you really want to use it I’d suggest asking the Licensing Working Group for an opinion.

Standards?

It’s not so much that there are no standards, more that OSM is incremental. If you just want to add a point, that’s fine; if you’ve got the time to draw in the full dimensions of the slipway and car park, even better. But it’s better to have the basic data than none at all.

That’s absolutely standard practice across OSM - the same is true for shops and churches, for example - and if you have the inclination, replacing simple points with areas is always welcome.

I’ve done a few slipways as I’ve been scrolling around US rivers so it’s great to see more work happening on this!

Behold Cassandra

actual laugh-out-loud at that, thank you :)

Behold Cassandra

I think what would really make the OSM diaries better is lots of people posting 989x2094px images to make a marginal rhetorical point

Spam diary entries

The bogus entries come in overnight (UK time) and get deleted in the morning UK time, so if you can set the refresh rate on your RSS reader accordingly, you should miss out on the spam wave.

Fonts missing from OSM Promotional Leaflets

AIUI Frobisher isn’t open source. (As the name would suggest, it’s very similar to the renowed Frutiger, which also isn’t open source.) However, Open Sans is pretty close in appearance to Frutiger and would probably be my first choice for an alternative.

#CrimeaІsUkraine #DWG #CrimeaMap #КримЦеУкраїна #ИхТамНет

Please stop posting the same thing repeatedly.

#CrimeaІsUkraine #DWG #CrimeaMap #КримЦеУкраїна #ИхТамНет

You’re not going to recruit people to your cause by posting the same thing to different people’s diaries repeatedly :(

Retiring from OSM

LACDH, I think people are having trouble understanding what you’re saying here. Could you give a concrete example? (e.g. “I added Frog Street in Toadville and now it’s been deleted”) What do you mean by “merged” and “cleaned up”?

Neutral ground

This personal style of attack is really not going to help to resolve any issues. Please stop it.