In the post several people (including myself) mention that the Moroccan-Western Saharan border follows the line of actual control, as is customary in OSM (as per TotG) and seen in other borders like the Jordan-Syrian border; but the Moroccan-Mauritanian border follows the de jure border, despite clear existence of Moroccan military facilities inside internationally-recognised Mauritanian territory. (example 1, example 2, example 3)
After trying to contact the OSM Africa communities on Matrix and Telegram with no response, I turn to the forum to do a last check before deciding to alter the Moroccan border to better fit with what seems to more closely align with the de facto reality in the region. If no discussion opposing this change comes from this thread in the next week I will follow through with this decision
I’d suggest documenting those here, and also trying any other optons you can think of.
When I went through a similar process for the Morocco / Spain and Morocco SADR boundaries** I also tried to contact anyone who looked like they had some familiarity of the area. I’ve not seen anyyhing on talk@, talk-africa, or indeed the OSM-Africa Telegram group (all are very low volume, but I suspect the mailing lists at least have a reasonable number of lurkers.
I certainly wouldn’t change anything until there has been at least some feedback from all affected parties. Also, thought must be given to exactly what is suggested to be changed - one boundary, or both?
As a project we need to have an answer to why the change was made when later questions are inevitably asked, and there also needs to be a plan to deal with edits made to the boundary after any change.
The proposal would be to (hyperlinks represent OSM objects):
Create a new relation “Mauritanian claim” (name=Mauritania boundary=claimed_administrative) akin to Moroccan claim as a copy of the current Mauritania
if the relation Western Sahara should be retagged to boundary=claimed_administrative and/or renamed to Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, like its de-facto equivalent
I am not at all familiar with the area but this user whom I already contacted seems to have a lot of knowledge about it, you’ll notice that if you take a look at their 2500+ notes. Just a suggestion.
I have also no knewledge about the boundaries southern part of Morocco but found this on net to clarify more(i do not know if i’m allowed to post this link,so remove it if not)