highway type changes by user kartog near SLovenj Gradec

Hi,

a complaint has been raised on the web site against user kartog claiming that:

“User wildly and arbitrary modifies way classification. … Many forestry roads were reclassified from track to unclassified road. Many such roads are closed for motor vehicles in some cases with locked gates. Some are only passable for specialized forestry vehicles, car would not be able to pass on such road…”

I have short-term blocked kartog’s account and asked them to get in touch with the community on this forum so that you have a chance to check if what he does is useful or not, and discuss.

Bye
Frederik

Hi,

We are contacting you as a KARTOG user because we noticed that you have temporarily blocked our username.

At the same time, we thank you for your warning regarding our data entries into an OSM map. The purpose of our work is to update the coverage of the Koroska area. We are a mapping company and we want to update road communications with the DTK 25 national mapping database since we noticed that the situation in several places was inadequate.
Obviously, we made conflict between the categorization of OSM and the categorization of the national mapping database which led to the fact that cart tracks were assigned to higher categorization (narrow undefined road connection) than it should be.
Please unlock our username and let us correct this discrepancy and add missing cart tracks, which are becoming more and more recent in Slovenia.

Kind regards,

Hi!

I have not checked any of your changes yet, but judging from your contribution summary you seem extremely active for a relatively new user.

Please refrain from copying road categorisation from ANY source. You should change the roads in OSM only if you have visited the road in person and are sure it is not categorised correctly. Copying in bulk will just make OSM as bad as other map providers a decade ago, which were just buying local sources, disregarding the knowledge of local mappers.

Road categorisation in OSM does NOT map to official categorisation. OSM allows for much more granular categorisation based on physical properties and legal status. Discrepancies with other sources are ok (OSM is better :stuck_out_tongue: of course. Where it is not it should be made better, not equal).

Please see:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Slovenia/Ceste
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:tracktype

I think changes should be reverted. Even if all road classification is returned to previous state there is other damage that was made with careless editing.
Real question is how high is ratio of undesirable alterations and actual new useful data entered. Revert would remove all.

Obvious mistakes noticed so far:

This change has split this way in remaining short stump and larger new way. But ways are not properly connected. They Overlap in two distinct nodes at same position. consequently routing doesn’t work properly.
I’m guessing several such mistakes were made. But were not noticed so far.

I also noticed that other mappers have discovered some mistakes:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/73235358#map=17/46.44110/15.08700
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/73235726#map=13/46.4341/15.1010

New ways were also added rather carelessly. There are many instances when such ways are not properly connected.

And another idiotic edit. Inspect node modifications in this changeset.
Properly placed hunting stand near (10m) the junction was removed an hunting stand tags were placed on junction. Like hunting stand is standing in a middle of a junction.

God knows how many such idiotic “improvements” were made by kartog.

The kartog user is using exclusively the iD editor (a web service / JavaScript) for all their edits (June 13th till now, August 2019). The iD is a fine editor for quick and simple edits, but for a serious and sustained work it lacks precision and functionality of a more comprehensive editor like josm. Also for work in the Slovenia region, currently the better underlay sources (imagery) like GURS DOF and ARSO LIDAR are readily available in josm, but not in iD (at least not by default). Nowadays it is irresponsible to make edits without at least consulting these two sources of imagery, if not also checking the situation on the ground.

Also, when editing roads, please do not share their nodes with unrelated objects like buildings, land use areas, administrative boundaries, etc.

So, KARTOG user is not blocked anymore and is continuing with editing. Are new edits more compliant with the OSM rules and has old edits been corrected?

Well, road classifications have been mainly restored. In large part by me, since kartog would have taken weeks or months to restore them plucking away with iD editor rather than using JOSM. Probably disconnecting many more roads in a process.
But I’m afraid many mistakes have gone unnoticed. Their edits were and still are sloppy. This will leave map with many routing errors (disconnected roads).
As mentioned they still use iD editor which has only outdated an poorly aligned satellite imagery available as source. They don’t seem to be using actual survey to provide mapping data, just imagery and imagination.
Even where imagery is well aligned, they often miss intersections by 50 meters or more.
They still make random intersections with vegetation and other non-road objects.
Basically many edits feel like work of cubistic artist rather than a mapper.