#adt improvements in the Pacific coast

some time ago we had a guy from a British Island, dmgroom_ct, who contributed a huge amount of work on both Pacific and Caribbean coast. huge work, and we chatted on the https://t.me/Comunidad_OSM_Panama Telegram Group.

the Pacific coast in Panamá has some 5m sea height tidal difference. the aerial pictures we have may have been taken at any tide level, we don’t know and we need to interpret it. the land which remains exposed may be rock, or mud, or sand, or it may have mangrove cover. whichever the case, it’s natural=wetland, wetland=tidalflat, it’s not part of the land mass.

in November 2020 the #adt (Apple Data Team) came to review all sort of things, when we realized they had been busy in the area, they assured us “las líneas costeras parecen bien a nuestro equipo” (the coast lines look good to us). however, I’m now seeing they “corrected” the contributions by dmgroom_ct.

Andrews says, very correctly, that it’s only me complaining about their edits, that’s true. nobody else reviews anything here in Panamá, except possibly https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/gscholz and https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/dmgroom_ct. local people will not enter in a “discussion”, because that’s simply a very bad thing to do here, “discussing” sounding like arguing aka fighting.

I’ve reviewed two points where the #adt has altered the coastline, and in both cases they didn’t consider the tide. one they already reverted, but I’m afraid their whole contributions on the Pacific side should be rolled back. if they had done this three years ago, they would have refined some very rough initial import from satellite data. but last November they messed up the quite accurate contributions by dmgroom_ct.

Hi Mario. Thanks for posting and thanks for the Telegram discussion about this issue. I have also seen your GitHub comment about this and your changeset comments about it. You make a good point about the coastlines, beaches and tidal areas. As you noted, we addressed the one that you pointed out yesterday, and per our chat today on Telegram we are going through and identifying similar issues that we are going to fix. We will also update the team about this modeling practice, though like I have mentioned on Telegram we are not planning to edit in Panama anytime soon — aside from edits related this issue. If we do plan to edit again I will make sure to inform the community again, as I noted on Telegram too. Thanks again.

Hi Andrew and community.
the telegram chat is at https://t.me/Comunidad_OSM_Panama/13182 and it has some links to nodes, ways, relations, and a few JOSM screenshots.
an interactive clarifying chat, possibly interesting to the readers of this post.