OpenStreetMap
Recently I have been editing trunk roads in the southern states, my edits have been mostly thanked by users. Recently, however, zsneese has been reverting my edits, threatening:
Please do not make changes to an area that you are not familiar with. There are much bigger issues on OSM that need to be corrected in other areas than nitpicking a trunked road (which you are incorrect about)... the roads that I am editing are accurate and consistent with our government mapping provided with us by the State of Georgia Department of Transportation. I will be correcting this and I will correct it every single time it is changed.
GDOT standards don’t mean much on OSM though! The Eastern States definition is:
...in the east, the tag is only used for roads which are a "Surface expressway": A relatively high-speed divided road (at least 40 MPH with a barrier or median separating each direction of traffic), with a limited amount of intersections and driveways.
Who is correct?
–floridaeditor
P.S. if you agree, will you help revert the edits using the JOSM reverter plugin for added authority?
Discussion
Comment from S-zation on 21 July 2020 at 18:34
OSM is a collaborative, crowd-sourced project that requires you to possess an ability to work with others. This does not mean you have carte blanche to downgrade all roads in the south east, especially if a user is disagreeing with your interpretation of the wiki’s tagging standards. This is something that needs to be solved by someone with actual authority (the Data Working Group), not by recruiting random outsiders to take action through reverts or by invoking edit-wars.
Comment from floridaeditor on 21 July 2020 at 18:53
See https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/88299504
Comment from highflyer74 on 21 July 2020 at 19:37
Blog entries are not really the best place for discussing tagging issues. Also edit-wars are not acceptable. The DWG should be contacted only after discussion within the local community leads to no result.
You guys should seek advice on
https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewforum.php?id=20
or
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
or
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
And: behave like adults. The wiki gives info on how to tag highways in general (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway), local differences (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway:International_equivalence) and the US (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_roads_tagging (please observe to note on top of this)).
All this together should facilitate a solution.
Comment from Jack the Ripper on 28 September 2020 at 00:46
I’m going to make a few observations, first about some of the previous comments, and second, about some of the downgrades. First, S-zation and highflyer74 are correct, we have to work together to make OSM a success. Second, many of the roads that you downgraded easily meet the definition given on the Trunk_road page, so why the downgrade?
Comment from MoiraPrime on 27 February 2021 at 14:53
This is just awful reasoning. The whole Tertiary->Trunk hierarchy is based on importance. If a road is important enough, it can be a trunk. Hell, even a dirt road in a developing country could be a trunk if it meets the importance on the hierarchy of roads. Don’t be so full of yourself. This is an open collaborative map and you’re expected to work with others. If you can’t work with others and keep causing map edit wars the DWG will get involved. Even after all this time the people of Alabama and Georgia are still working on cleaning up your trunk downgrades. None of the local communities you downgraded were OK with your changes.