Hi,
So you are saying that a group of mappers work done over the last 15
years should be wiped out because you don’t like it?
In so far as this work has gone against OSM’s “on the ground rule”, i.e.
recording things that cannot be verified on the ground, yes, but not
because “I don’t like it” but because “OSM doesn’t like it”.
If such data is in OSM, then it is there because (in the best case) of a
misunderstanding and (in the worst case) of a willful violation of the
“on the ground rule”.
Note that I am speaking about railways that have been over-built with
other developments, and nothing remains on the ground of the original
railway. Such data never had any place in OSM.
If someone has spent a lot of work adding such data, it appears that it
is relatively easy to move it to “OpenHistoricalMap”, a project that
complements OSM and has specifically been created to record information
about things that may have vanished. So the work isn’t lost; it’s just
that there’s no place in OSM for information about things that are not
there anymore.
I acknowledge that there are many cases where someone with “an eye for
it” can identify a former railway line from on-the-ground cues and this
is a different scenario. In these cases, there is room in OSM for the
things that can still be seen, and sometimes there is discussion about
just how much there needs to be seen to justify some form of railway tag
(i.e. is this just some kind of embankment I see there, or is it a
former railway line?).
Bye
Frederik