I’m responsible for the edits.
The location of those edits is at the heart of the Haynesville Shale formation, where through fracking, huge amounts of natural gas are extracted, and massive amounts of infrastructure have been built for this purpose over the last 10-15 years. (‘gathering systems’, ‘takeaway capacity’) Several parallel pipelines from different operators are not uncommon (rather the rule). This just as some general context.
The line added here was/is part of the 6000-mile Southern Natural Gas system. The line also includes a looped section. (Loop line is simply a parallel pipe, to increase capacity) I started work on this system already over a year ago, and this section (between Logansport/Bear Creek compressor stations) was the final stretch of the system (and the furthest west). I added it now a few days ago as part of an effort to continue mapping pipelines in Mississippi & Louisiana.
A part of the line which I’ve added was already mapped before by someone else. Same goes for other pipelines in the area/the corridor. (However none of those has any descriptive tags other than man_made=pipeline/location=underground, also the geometries are often somewhat rough (which isn’t something bad IMO))
(I’m talking about the longer of the two ways, way 746288835)
The ways which I added have impossible overlaps with older ways (or at least one), with more rough geometries. The opening post here links to such a situation at “Sometimes the alignment matches the imagery, sometimes it does not Link”
The older way which overlaps is Way 833942478, History. I removed a section, where it was easier to just trace ‘my’ way from scratch - I intended to recycle the remaining rest of this way as part of another parallel pipeline at some future point - but not without more descriptive tagging and more comprehensive geometry details (the overlap location is by far not the only point with ‘rough geometry’) Because the entire state is a massive work in progress (related to pipelines), I didn’t bother too much about such minor details (as mentioned, I was going intending to improve the geometry/tagging of the adjacent in the near future anyway)
Re: Markers
I’m unsure if this thing you’ve linked is a marker or even related to pipeline operation. Could also be a hunting stand? Or it is some kind of measure device) (Maybe, maybe, I have no clue. If you map pipelines by markers, you know probably better) Even aerial inspection markers are often hard to spot, let alone the normal posts at high/rail/waterway crossings. (Depends on the imagery, of course)
“I’m not sure how anyone can see from imagery that there are exactly 4 pipelines in the indicated area? Also, since the alignments don’t match imagery presumably that came from somewhere else, as did the pipeline diameter?”
There are more than 4 pipelines. According to the PHMSA public viewer 5 lines, and I’m certain that there are more gas gathering lines (needs more research). The public viewer is from the US Pipeline & Hazardrous Materials Safety Administration, a subdivision of the US Department of Transportation. The data is as such public domain. I use this as rough reference for the routes. I’m not sure what you mean by “the alignments don’t match imagery”. This little missing curve there? Well, this is all still a huge work in progress.
The diameter came from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commision’s online library. This is not some kind of Web GIS, I have to search through the 4.4 million documents to get my information. (Last time I looked it up it was at 2.5 million, apparently they scanned/made available old documents, the earliest ones being hydropower-related docs from 1921)
There are various documents which refer to the Logansport Line (which I added) as being a “14 inch line”, at various locations. For example here on Page 4/Row 5, here on Page 5/Row 3, here on Page 2. (note that I don’t know how to link to documents directly there, so I used a filehoster.)
The original ‘problem’ with this edit was that some person (?) alleged it was an import (even “clearly”, that’s… a negative cherry on the top"), and doing this edit violates the promise I gave for my last unblock. I strongly disagree with this. In my view, this was a perfectly normal edit, which just used external sources as references. I didn’t use external geodata & uploaded it, I didn’t even ‘copy’ external data - I checked it for plausibility, made sure it’s correct & added it. This happens on OSM everyday, all over the world, by hundreds of people, and is absolutely nothing which would fall under any import guidelines.
An more extreme example: Someone in the US extensively edits/edited based an external source, in every state, thousands of objects. I would say part of this also falls into the “copying” category, because the names given have sometimes very minor issues. None of this activity is documented/discussed anywhere, but no one has ever really complained. Why? Because there is no reason to.
I also have some actual imports in mind, and started working on their documentation recently, this for example.
There also seems to be issues with how I state my sources (If i’m understanding it correctly)
I was asked about them in a changeset comment, and promptly stated them with additional detail. I don’t really see much of a problem there. In the future, I will make sure to add referenced external sources as a source tag to the changeset and keep track of all sources used on my user page. However, I will have to get used to this first (& this isn’t required by any guidelines).
Greetings
