Coastline broken because of Pamlico sound edit

Jochen_Topf · 2023-01-02T08:15:53.553Z

The coastline processing has been broken again for almost a month now because somebody decided to change the Pamlico sound from “sea” to “inland water”. See Internal coastline map . Would that somebody please check how the correct mapping of the coastline works and fix it.

(For some background why a “small” problem breaks the whole coastline processing see Preventing the Flooding of the Planet — Jochen Topf )

ZeLonewolf · 2023-01-02T15:47:23.226Z

Jochen_Topf:

Would that somebody please check how the correct mapping of the coastline works

Sorry, I’ve been trying to undo a series of edits that pushed the coastline to the outside of the outer banks. Maintaining these beast mega-polygons are difficult even for editors like myself that are experienced in doing these edits, and mistakes happen. It’s not because I’m stupid, it’s because these polygons are a huge pain in the butt to handle, and sometimes mistakes happen.

Next time, instead of coming onto the forums and acting like a jerk about it, please leave a polite comment on the problem changeset and I know I’d be happy to make a fix whenever I break things. The first I heard about this was someone that messaged me and said “hey, Jochen is complaining about your edit”.

This is exactly the kind of thing I’m trying to fix in my discussion on the mapping of large seas and it’s one of the motivations for my high seas proposal.

ZeLonewolf · 2023-01-02T16:19:19.434Z

I just pulled down an overpass query of the eastern US coastline in a bounding box from New Jersey to Georgia using the following query:

[out:json][timeout:250];
way["natural"="coastline"]({{bbox}});
out body;
>;
out skel qt;

JOSM reported no coastline breakage warnings, so either someone has fixed it already, or the coastline is fine.

If the issue is that this change is too big of a coastline movement then that’s not my problem. I’m just trying to fix the damage already done and put the coastline where it’s supposed to be by OSM conventions (and do it in reasonable chunks over time).

Jochen_Topf · 2023-01-02T19:24:53.814Z

I am not talking about any “megapolygons”. I am just talking about the natural=coastline tagging. It is wrong. It’s not that the coastline is broken, it is in the wrong place. The coastline should be between land and the sea. The new coastline is not between land and sea, but clearly the land side includes huge areas that are now tagged as inland water when, in fact, they are clearly maritime water areas and were tagged that way until about a month ago. I am sorry, I didn’t comment on any changeset, but this comes up again and again and I have given up trying to figure out who did what and what changeset is involved. I just don’t have the time.

All I am saying is: The coastline processing is broken and somebody has to fix the data before the processing works again. Until then there are no coastline updates for the main OSM map and most other maps people create, because they depend on that processing.

I haven’t read your proposals, but we can’t change existing definitions of what a coastline is and isn’t any more anyway. This definition has been around for a very very long time in OSM and lots of people rely on it. Any new tagging schema can add additional information, but has to keep in place what’s already there.

ZeLonewolf · 2023-01-02T20:39:33.326Z

Jochen_Topf:

I am not talking about any “megapolygons”. I am just talking about the natural=coastline tagging. It is wrong. It’s not that the coastline is broken, it is in the wrong place. The coastline should be between land and the sea. The new coastline is not between land and sea, but clearly the land side includes huge areas that are now tagged as inland water when, in fact, they are clearly maritime water areas and were tagged that way until about a month ago.

First off, your facts are wrong. Prior to my edits, the coastline was on the outside of the Outer Banks which caused a whole bunch of obviously maritime areas to be inside the coastline, such as Pamilco Sound and Albermarle Sound (pictured on the map below). So what you’re complaining about is literally what I’ve been trying to fix. I’m not stupid but you seem to think I am. Massive sections of maritime areas are inside the coastline and I’ve been trying to fix them chunks at a time. Each bit of water area is a multipolygon with hundreds of ways that need to get deal with, ordering the coastline in the right direction, etc.

We agree that Pamilco Sound is a maritime area that’s outside the coastline, right? So that’s what I did, I moved it outside the coastline last month, which is what is showing up on your detector. Today I moved Croaton Sound and Roanoke Sound outside the coastline, which are the next two adjacent bodies of open water to the north on either side of Wanchese. I think we can agree those are also maritime areas.

image816×820 171 KB

I’m sorry this is taking longer than you’d like to put the coastline where it belongs. I guess I should stop working on this massive project and let it to be somebody else’s problem if I’m going to get harassed for not doing all the work at once, when I had nothing to do with the original coastline being placed outside the Outer Banks in the first place.

Please stop making half-researched assumptions and implying bad intent. If coastline processing is too much work for you in your personal capacity, perhaps now is the time to reconsider whether this personal effort is worth your continued angst.

Jochen_Topf:

I haven’t read your proposals

Obviously.

ZeLonewolf · 2023-01-02T21:03:40.102Z

By the way, the offending edit that move the coastline to the wrong place was here, two years ago:

OpenStreetMap

Changeset: 86467703 | OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.

I think you’ll note that discussion was part of the leadup to the famed Chesapeak Bay edit that caused so much turmoil. While the Chesapeake was eventually fixed (and one of the perpetrators of that was later welcomed into the DWG), the North Carolina edits that did the same thing somehow slipped under the radar.

I am now working to repair that damage.

Jochen_Topf · 2023-01-02T21:25:55.103Z

Aargh. You are right. It was broken before and is fixed now. I could swear this looked different when I checked it before posting, but I was obviously confused by my own tool and lept to conclusions.

Thanks for fixing this and sorry for all the confusion!

If you keep fixing this, could you check Internal coastline map after large changes to make sure this isn’t triggering my checks and if it does, tell me? Then I would know I can allow those changes.

ZeLonewolf · 2023-01-02T21:32:20.111Z

No worries. Glad we found our way to a mutual understanding.