Just worth noting that in December 2022, iD editor deprecated site_type in favour of archaeological_site for the historic=archaeological_site preset.
Two week on, it seems to me that the discussion has come to an end and that support is in favour of the transitional simultaneous tagging as suggested.
After a number of successful tests and pilots, I will now proceed to mechanically amend the tagging. I will do this in smaller geographical units, and I will only do this for objects that are tagged as historic=archaeological sites.
I went through all the site_type= in the historic= group that are not tagged =archaeological_site in the last two weeks manually in preparation to guarantee data quality.
For details, see the documentation.
2 Likes
done. The tagging has been amended.
There is one group of archaeological sites that still carry the deprecated site_type= tag exclusively: about 2000 of New Zealandâs prehistoric fortifications, called pÄs. For historic reasons, these archaeological sites are tagged historic=pa and not historic=archaeological_site:
As I have only included objects under the historic=archaeological_site tagging scheme in the edit above so far, the instances of site_type= under historic=pa have not been part of the edit.
For reasons of data consistency and to not leave those Maori archaeological sites behind, I suggest to extend the above tagging edit to objects tagged historic=pa, meaning to also there
-
now tag a ll POIs tagged
site_type=simultaneously witharchaeological_site=and vice versa. -
in July 2023, remove the
site_type=in all the POIs simultaneously taggedarchaeological_site=.
All data users of site_type= had been informed in January already.
What do you think?
All data users of site_type= had been informed in January already.
how was this possible? I would be interested in the details, could be useful for other cases as wellâŚ
2 Likes
I should have been more precise. What I meant is: All known data users of site_type= as documented in Taginfo have been informed in January already.
1 Like
That is simply untrue.
I stumbled across an edit to something with this tagging just 5 minutes ago. The changes to this and this were neither discussed in this thread above nor at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Automated_edits/ChillyDL#values_affected. Neither are archaeological sites.
I think you need to stop now.
Iâm still trying to decipher the higgledy-piggledy edits youâve done so far (see note above), and I suspect that Iâm actually more aware of the changes that youâre making than most people. Iâd suggest waiting a few months to let people catch up and work out why the things that they expect to see in the data that they get from OSM isnât there any more.
Just changing tag values from one thing to another isnât a cost-free process. For example, if you** change âhistoric=somethingelseâ to âhistoric=industrialâ itâll cause a problem to all those people who were deliberately ignoring âhistoric=industrialâ - theyâll need to look at some other tag in the data to decide whether to render it or not.
Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, just fiddling about with tags (except to correct misspellings etc.) does not result in any more things being mapped in OSM - it does not improve the quality of OSM data in any way.
** Edit: I should point out that Iâm just using âhistoric=industrialâ as an example here. I wasnât expecting your edits to that key, true, but it does seem that most of the growth was in 2020 and 2021. The 2020 growth looks like an organic process that might correspond to people actually checking the values they are changing, but the two jumps in 2021 look like a whole bunch of data having its keys changed in one go. For the avoidance of doubt, each of these pre-dates your edits of 3 months ago.
Now, this is surprising. A certain âSomeoneElseâ pointed out above that the data users âare not living under a rockâ and that they were most likely informed already. I contacted them all the same.
@SomeoneElse, I sent you an OSM message.
Yes. These 16 objects are neither automated edits nor mass edits nor archaeological sites nor are the edits part of the implementation of the new tagging scheme. That is why they are not discussed in this thread and the proposal.
I am not happy with the allegations and insinuations here. What is described here as âhiggledy-piggledy editsâ has been the product of weeks of work to systematically sift through all thousands of possibly archaeological sites manually, when editing the occasional non-archaeological object that I came across.
I have shifted the =industrial of the odd former, non-archaeological mill from site_type= to historic=, stuff like this. I have not done any mass or automated edits, let alone years ago in the historic=industrial sphere with a sock puppet or how ever this could have been possible.
Also, I do not see how this is an argument to not protect New Zealandâs archaeological sites equally from the effects of the unfortunate depreciation decision.
To start with this one first:
Iâm suggesting that we let the fallout from your previous edits hit the ground before embarking on more of them.
I donât know what else you have done that you havenât told us about, and there might be nothing, but please letâs wait a bit before embarking on the next phase!
What is your goal here?
What are you trying to do with OSM data that you canât at the moment that requires the âto and froâ edits to e.g. https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/5501813929/history to achieve it?
âFalloutâ from my edits? âHavenât toldâ you about?
I would really appreciate if you could sport another tone.
What my goal was?
I was picking up the pieces after somebody elseâs less then ideal and then aborted mass edit of archaeological sites, after nothing had been done for two months. In my perception, time was crucial to prevent tens of thousands of objects from disappearing from maps or whatever. In this situation I considered it better to assume the existing data is okayish enough to just add a (duplicate) tag and thus safeguard the previous usability. Quality assurance of the existing data could then be done later.
With more time at hand because of the further two weeks for discussion and the February updates of the data users not realistically to be reached any more anyway, I decided to have a go at quality assurance before the duplicate tagging already. As it turned out, data quality was not always too brilliant. So, in a number of cases, archaeological sites had not been tagged as such, in some other cases objects wrongly had archaeological tags. I fixed this manually. See above and in the Documentation. In cases where there had been an upload with duplicate tagging before, you will see two edits accordingly.
you retagged things like a historic mill (apparently) to âhistoric=industrialâ, this is not a tag with a known definition, and it doesnât seem to be a good tag to me (e.g. here, if it is what I think it is, I would have tagged historic=mill, but not from remote without knowing the place). I wholeheartedly agree with someone else: âjust fiddling about with tags (except to correct misspellings etc.) does not result in any more things being mapped in OSM - it does not improve the quality of OSM data in any way.â
1 Like
Just to be clear - Iâm not doubting your good intentions here. Itâs just that thereâs a well-known and effective way to resolve the issues resulting from a problematic mass edit - revert it to the status quo ante, and then discuss the plan to go forward from there.
I agree that the original mass edit was problematic - as I mentioned before, it was there that I spotted features âdisappearingâ (actually, getting shown with more generic icons), so thanks for trying to resolve that issue. However, dual tagging of the new âapprovedâ tag (by 20 people) shouldnât cause things (especially non-archaeological things) to disappear.
There isnât a rush - waiting a couple of months wonât cause any more problems. Youâre right that some of the tagging in this area isnât great - thereâs some overlap between âarchaeologicalâ and ânon-archaeological historicâ, but thatâll only get sorted by taking time to go through the data items one by one. Just changing one set of OSM tags for another wonât fix things that were miscategorised in the first place,
Sure.
I must say, I did not decide on their status as archaeological sites. They were not tagged as such, but used the deprecated site_type=industrial where other objects in the area use historic=industrial. The situation in this case was that in the Yorkshire Dales and North Pennines, a tagging as historic=industrial is fairly common, introduced by a user about three years ago. It does not have a documented definition, and it doesnât seem fitting well within other âhistoricâ values because it doesnât tell what it actually is/was, like you write. But this being the local scheme â albeit not always consequently in its details â, I used this scheme with 6 objects to keep local consistency.
This makes sense to me, but I can undo this with these objects.
I would suggest that the use of âsite_typeâ for industrial non-archaeological sites was never discussed, let alone deprecated.
Just to be clear on what happened here - the change of site_type to archaeological_site for archaeological sites (my emphasis - but itâs right at the top of the recent proposal) was suggested here for the reasons laid out here. The ârejected crannog proposalâ is here. That was ârejectedâ because 5 people (out of 13) voted against it.
The custom of âvotingâ for OSM tags on the wiki really is the tail wagging the dog here.
The custom of âvotingâ for OSM tags on the wiki really is the tail wagging the dog here.
+1, no issue with 10 people introducing a tag catering for a niche interest, but a bunch of wiki voters deprecating a tag with 100.000 global uses is not a desirable IMHO, especially when there arenât any issues to solve, itâs a mere renaming and the reasons are only cosmetic.
1 Like
Iâm happy that people like @ChillyDL are creating new tagging standards and deprecating unclear tags like site_type in the process. We can never expect the ENTIRE OSM community to join in the decision-making process, but if a few mappers with a practical mindset can get a proposal approved and inform the broader community and prominent users of big changes, then thatâs a good way to evolve tagging schemes.
2 Likes