I am proposing a mechanical edit of around 3k mis-tagged bus stops in the greater Boston, MA, USA area. Specifically, retagging the many stops not associated with a way from stop_position to platform. Please see Mechanical Edits/JesseFTW/Fix MBTA stop position nodes - OpenStreetMap Wiki for the full details.
While I expect this to be pretty uncontroversial, I want to follow the process, and I welcome any comments/suggestions/concerns.
Given the resounding silence here, and support in the OSM US Slack, and the ease of reverting this if it’s desired, I’m going to go forward with it now. @watmildon offered to do it in one pass with JOSM, so I’m going to tell him to go for it.
After a bit of discussion on the OSMUS Slack, MBTA transit objects have received a bit more harmonization and tagging consistency. Particularly the operator: and network: tags. Completed as Changeset: 139458879 | OpenStreetMap and Changeset: 139458720 | OpenStreetMap.
Another possible harmonization: there are currently 1867 entities tagged with network=MBTA that don’t have a network:wikidata set. They are all in the area of the Boston, MA MBTA (the other MBTA over on the West Coast of the US recently changed their acronym, and has been updated), so it is very likely safe to do a mass update to add network:wikidata=Q171985 to all of them. The question is whether this is worth it.
PTNA does not (yet) suggest the network:wikidata key, which means as I continue to add routes from the GTFS data thru it, we’ll have more to add. I’d like to get around to submitting a PR to add this, but haven’t done so yet. That suggests it might be better to wait – but OTOH, having it missing from the existing entries just adds noise whenever anyone touches them in iD (which does suggest the network:wikidata key).
@watmildon Thoughts?
I don’t have a strong opinion other than “it looks like a natural extension of the usual scheme”. I don’t think it hurts anything and is an easy enough edit to make.
Yesterday, KevinMapsThings | OpenStreetMap unexpectedly, and without any discussion, changed all the network=MBTA values to network=Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. While this may be a good idea, it needs a lot more warning and discussion first! As it stands, it produced a big pile of warnings from PTNA, and I’ve asked Kevin to revert it. If he doesn’t do so promptly, @watmildon would you be so kind?
(edit: it doesn’t look like he changed all of them, overpass turbo – just about 257 (which is still way more than should be changed without discussion!)
Changeset: 140425174 | OpenStreetMap
Changeset: 140425564 | OpenStreetMap
My apologies for jumping the gun here and thank you for the comment pointing me to this discussion.
I made the change yesterday on a limited subset of map entities and then a few hours later (while in iD) realized that the name harmonizer was not in alignment with the change I made. I was planning on making the revert change set today (and will do that shortly), specifically changing network=Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority back to network=MBTA. My plan was to retain the network:short=MBTA changes since that appears to be in alignment until we get the long form squared away.
I made a similar change with operator= on many of the entities, since that one appeared to be a bit more mixed in terms of what form was used. Should I also go ahead and revert those back to the short form in another change set?
Network revert: Changeset: 140455781 | OpenStreetMap
Operator revert: Changeset: 140455925 | OpenStreetMap
Wonderful, thank you! Regarding operator … yeah, that’s really mixed, so frankly either way is fine. 
And yeah, adding network:short is very welcome.
If you’d like to help with adding stops to bus routes (and splitting them by direction/variant), that would be VERY APPRECIATED (by me, at least), and I’d be delighted to help explain my process.
Team work makes the dream work. Happy to see everyone rowing in the same direction!