After noticing myself there were discrepancies between the Romanian E8 long distance hiking route as mapped on OSM and the official GPS trace provided by the operator of the route (SKV), I contacted the operator and offered to remap the route. I just finished doing this, in cooperation with SKV (Ioan Bodnar), and would like to ask someone more experienced in mapping long distance hiking routes to check my work.
I’m sure there’s loads of tools to check relations, but in this case, you should have a look at Waymarked Trails - Hiking. There a panel “Check relation”, it now tells that there are 13 unordered segments. Out of 1300+ member, that’s pretty good !
I’m not sure you can order members in iD, especially at this scale. You should try JOSM, it’s not that bad, and really powerful !
If you really can’t, and nobody else jumps on it, I might try to do the reordering if you wish.
The only “problems” highlighted there are the two detours from the main route off to POIs at one side. Clearly it’s impossible to have a “perfectly ordered” relation that has 4 ends like this one does, so nothing (not even JOSM!) can do that as things stand.
One option to make life easier might be to have a “relation of relations” within Romania consisting of the three linear pieces, each of which is a relation in its own right. That “E8 within Romania” would then fit into the main E8 as it does now.
Maybe I can, but I would rather spend my efforts on mapping other hiking route relations (I’m working on the Sammiana Endless Trail in N. Macedonia right now) than on learning JOSM and the checking tools. So if someone else already knows how to do that…
Do I understand correctly that it would be easier for checking if there was one relation for the main route, other relations for each alternative, excursion, approach, etc. and then put all those relations in a superrelation? Looks like E4 Cyprus (which I hope to hike next month) is organised like that.
It would be easier for people who like to keep relations sorted, yes. However, it’s entirely reasonable to leave someone who cares about that to do that and go and map the next one on the ground instead
