I concur with a lot of your observations and like you i had essentially given up on the idea of the coastline representing meaningful information in the long term. But considering this is a very sad conclusion which essentially means OpenStreetMap failing in its primary goal in the single most fundamental mapping task of the planet, namely the distinction between ocean and land, i am trying my best here to work towards a consensus - no matter how slim the chances are from my perspective.
> 1) We should establish an agreed "OSM Coastline position", which I > suggest would approximate to the position of the coastline on 1 > January 2020. > > 2) Any edit which moved the position of the coastline by more than > 20Km from the established position should be classed as vandalism, > unless such movement had previously been agreed by the community. That is a practically feasible approach but it would form a major beachhead in abolishing the principle of verifiablility in OpenStreetMap in favor of adopting the major consensus narrative of the OSM community as the reality to map rather than the intersubjectively verifiable reality. To put it bluntly: In your scenario if the OSM community agreed on ignoring the physical reality mapping of the coastline could depart arbitrarily far from said physical reality. We de facto already have the situation that if edits are contested the status quo is the fallback. And more strongly formalizing that in case of the coastline could be a good idea. But to forgo having a verifiable definition of the coastline tag supported by consensus is not a good idea IMO. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
