I can tell you that the road in question was mapped by me from a photo taken from a motorcycle drive-by with a camera. I didn’t look at the way very closely but because it had a name, no obvious houses, and could perhaps connect with the residential streets in the trees, I opted for unclassified. It’s a tough call either way because the soi is so small. Usually in Chiang Mai, any road that has a name is residential even if it’s a tiny soi but in this case tagging it as a service road isn’t a horrible choice.
Creating those residential ways near Russ’s powder coat shop look like the work of a pure amateur, however. Again we see ways that were drawn hastily, connected through 90-degree corners, and that look like they’re only rough tracks through a field. The only cure for it is to write changeset comments asking them what reasoning they used to add such “ways” to OSM.
I fear that this is the future of OSM. Its very openness and the assumption that everyone who edits the map has the goal of making a quality map worked for a long time. I bring up the example of Wikipedia again because it too was once very open but because of vandalism and concerns about data integrity, the organization decided to close its ranks. They made it more difficult for a casual contributor to add information. They made it so difficult that many people, myself included, stopped contributing anything. Lots of good information and help was lost when they did that. If there is no vetting process at OSM and no training period for new mappers, we’ll just have to learn to live with this sort of thing until it becomes such a problem that OSM resorts to the same prohibitive stance.
Dave