Hi, I would like to make one point that has been touched on but not said clearly, I think.
Some proponents of the recent changes to Chesapeake bay have used reasoning like: "Only by mapping the bay as a polygon can $SOFTWARE properly determine that a given location is in the bay, as opposed to in some undfined part of the sea." To this, Jochen has even replied along the lines of "create a polygon if you want but additionally use the natural=coastline tag". I want to issue a stern warning here: This line of thinking will not stop with Chesapeake bay. People are already creating giant multipolygons for the Strait of X and the Gulf of Y all over OSM. Before too long, a desire to have $SOFTWARE properly decide that a given location is, say, in the Atlantic Ocean, will give rise to demands that the Atlantic Ocean be mapped as a giant, named water polygon. Our current tooling makes this impractical (that's the very reason why we handle the coastline like we do). Even the 2000+ member "gulfs" and "bays" and "straits" that some people seem to derive endless pleasure from plastering the map with - often using questionable third-party sources or guesswork to define where exactly you leave the ocean and enter the gulf - already complicate the delicate community processes of editing and quality assurance. Splitting a single piece of coastline anywhere along Chesapeake bay now will, for example, give your changeset a bounding box that encompasses the whole bay. Anyone monitoring local edits gets swamped with false positives like that. It will also require uploading a complete new version of the giant bay polygon, vastly increasing the likelihood of edit conflicts that might well lead a hapless novice to abandoning their work, rather than trying to solve the conflict. Now, you might smirk and say "let's fix the tools then", but until the tools are fixed - which might take years -, you've made life a hell of a lot harder for anyone editing or quality monitoring in the whole area. And all for what - a nice blue label in the bay? Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
