Just to check this query captures everything needed to be edited?
[out:xml][timeout:180];
area[name="United Kingdom"]->.a;
(
node[operator="Sustrans"](area.a);
way[operator="Sustrans"](area.a);
relation[operator="Sustrans"](area.a);
);
out geom;
Plan is to export this into JOSM and run all the edits in there but I wanna double check this captures everything. I did notice when I looked for nodes tagged with the sustrans website I got significantly more data from overpass turbo.
Would it be a better idea to upgrade all of the operator=sustrans to a wikidata tag for Sustrans and then they’ll all be auto updated when that wikidata entry is updated? Avoids having to mess around with the website confusion as well.
Okay, I went through and double checked all the website tags containing sustrans.org.uk using a little script and they all redirect correctly and none of them 404 so should just be a case of swapping out the sustrans.org.uk to www.walkwheelcycletrust.org.uk without replacing the path info. I couldn’t work out how to do this in JOSM so will likely be something I have to write a script for which may take me a bit. If anyone knows how to do that without writing some code for it let me know.
And coming back to all of the items tagged with the sustrans websites but listed as opperated by someone else. From what I can tell all of them are operated by Walk Wheel Cycle Trust and all of the signs should be denoted as operated by them. They might be on the land of, for instance, the national trust or a local council but they aren’t the operator. What would people think about a bulk edit to change all the signs tagged with the website to have the operator=Walk Wheel Cycle Trust tag and the relevant operator:wikidata tag?
So these guideposts with website=sustrans.org.uk are wrong, they should only have a website link if like a cycle route there’s a specific page on sustrans/WWCT website that you’re linking to. Otherwise, it should be operator:website. Certainly these should all have operator=WWCT and operator:wikidata=Qwhatever.
Update on this, I’ve been going through the wiki and updated the main instances of “Sustrans” to “Walk Wheel Cycle Trust” wherever practical. However there’s over 500 results for the word Sustrans so while I’ve updated the main pages I’ve not gone through every regional page that happens to mention Sustrans in their cycling section.
Started work on updating all the website links, unfortunately they all need manually checking to make sure they go to the right place. Lots of them go to a soft 404 or a parent page. I started work in this changeset: Changeset: 173312326 | OpenStreetMap
Given it’s only for the mile-posts why would a cycle router use the sustrans_ref of that mile-post? I’ve gone through a few different cycle routers and CycleStreets seems to be the only one I could find that even shows the mile-posts on the map. I couldn’t find a way to access the sustrans_ref in that router or do anything that would depend on it.
Would love to know what you think being the only one who we know for a fact is using it on renaming it. Renaming it to something agnostic of the name of the charity like ncn_milepost_ref seems like an obvious move to me but I don’t work with the data so I don’t know how many potential problems that would cause.
What would be your opinion about changing the tag? Obviously there is no benefit to changing it, and there’s some effort behind making the change, but also it doesn’t make much sense to continue using a tag named after an old name.
It makes sense to change it to something else, since “Sustrans” will gradually disappear from people’s consciousness, but I have no view as to what new name would be best - I don’t really mind whether it is an operator-agnostic one or not. What sometimes helps is to see what other countries do?
What is often missed with things like this is a community discussion about the change, but obviously that’s happening here.
The modern practice for more niche ref spaces is to use a country-code prefix, and make a key of the form ref:GB:*. I think it’s better for the final part to reflect the dataset/register name rather than just the organisation that’s running it, to cover the case where the same organisation might have multiple different datasets and ref spaces.
In this case, I’d probably go for something like ref:GB:ncn_milepost. I guess storing these refs isn’t so much to be useful for data consumers, but to allow OSM editors internally to verify the mileposts against the list from Sustrans the Walk Wheel Cycle Trust.
