There are lots of features on Rottnest Island (Western Australia) that do not actually exist on the ground. They’re mostly things dating from the Second World War. For example, there’s this group of buildings with names such as “D1 Type Sleeping Hut (1941)”.
I think most of this data has been added by Alistair_P, who seems like a great mapper with a great eye for detail, but who wants OSM to contain historical detail that’s perhaps not appropriate. I’ve reached out to them on a recent changeset and also on a previous changeset (which I can’t now find, sorry! It was related to this track).
Lots of this data is probably fine, and in many cases there are traces of buildings etc. left on the ground. But in many cases there definitely aren’t (for example, the former railway alignment that passes over the airstrip). I’ve deleted parts of this in the past, but the features have been added again.
I guess I’m just wondering how to handle this. It came up for me yesterday while I was walking with my mum, and we were led astray by 1941 tracks, and ended up having to bush-bash for a few hundred metres.
If the feature is not visible yet others are adding it back in when deleted, then I would start using the lifecycle prefix tagging. For example, demolished:railway=* for the former alignment of the railway or ruins:building=* for a location where the foundation of a building is still visible.
There are also visibility tags for paths that might be useful. Depending on the renderer these can lower the portrayal of the track on the map. In the case of that track I would also move the “name” to a “description” tag unless there are signs on the ground with those names.
I’d have thought that https://www.openhistoricalmap.org would be a good home for lots of that. There’s a fair bit of WW2 infrastructure still there in some form (when I was last there - a good few years ago now, I stayed in a former barracks building).
If they aren’t getting their emails (going into spam, maybe?) then @Fizzie41 or I can send them a “message they have to read before continuing to edit” politely asking them to answer some of the questions asked in changeset discussions, if that would help.
Their last edit was 3 months ago, so it might not be a snappy conversation, though.
But would that have to be only be mapped on OHM, or would something like landuse=military + military=bunker + historical=yes, stop it appearing as a current military installation?
Yes, I think there are zero things on Rottnest that should have a military:* tag, without any prefix. At the moment, there’s a bunch of things on the osm.org map highlighted as pink cross-hatching where actually there’s nothing to be seen and they’re certainly not under any military control.
I’ve started marking them as demolished:military=*. Oh, and the amenity=prison is gone too.
(By the way, thanks Fizzie for the link to the comments list, I’d not realised that tool can do a single-user view.)
If they aren’t getting their emails (going into spam, maybe?) then @Fizzie41 or I can send them a “message they have to read before continuing to edit” politely asking them to answer some of the questions asked in changeset discussions, if that would help.
Their last edit was 3 months ago, so it might not be a snappy conversation, though.
@SomeoneElse thanks for the offer but I think you’re right, it might not get a response. I really don’t want to discourage @Alistair_P from mapping! Because their contributions are detailed and good, it’s just that some don’t exist and some of the tagging is wrong. (Alistair, if you’re reading this, I hope you don’t think I’m being unjustly critical here!)
