User talk:ZeLonewolf/proposals/Boundary relation way members

Caveat

I largely agree with the proposal, but I'd like to offer a caveat. My current practice is to still apply only boundary=administrative to the boundary ways, and all other tags to the relation. This has to do with editor limitations; I use iD, but I understand how enforcing boundary=administrative on ways could simplify several validations:

• Filtering out administrative boundaries from the display is far simpler if they are explicitly tagged, rather than analysing all relations it participates in;
• It is generally undesirable to reuse the same way as a boundary and something else (waterways, roads or multipolygons reused as admin boundaries are real PITA to deal with). It is much simpler to validate that if the ways are tagged.

So, while redundant, it is not entirely unreasonable to keep some minimal tagging on boundary ways. Duja (talk) 20:49, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

So, I'm not normally an iD user, but I was able to toggle boundaries on and off with no problem with boundary tagging on the relation only. See this location for where I tried it.

With regard with the practice of reusing ways on boundaries (which is at best a controversial practice, and at worst explicitly discouraged), it seems that it is straightfoward to test for these cases in JOSM (with Ctrl+F) or via targeted Overpass queries. I'm not sure what that means for iD. Perhaps you could pose an example?

In either case, I explicitly leave the door open for mappers that wish to make this redundant tagging, while removing the recommendation that it always occur. I have removed such redundant tagging on all administrative boundaries in Rhode Island, and so far I've seen no ill effect from this change. I could see it used in the example that a particular stretch of boundary has a name (think "Mason-Dixon Line") for which a mapper would want to explicitly tag the way.

--ZeLonewolf (talk) 02:01, 21 November 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, I forgot about this :). I was speaking more from the viewpoint of a potential implementation, than any actual one. But then, I was probably wrong – the validation should simply detect that a way participating in a boundary=administrative relation may not have other feature tags (such as waterway or highway). No such validation is currently implemented in iD, and I'll probably open a new issue.
Your filtering example works in iD because the way has no other feature tags. There is an open issue still popping up in some edge cases such as [1]. However, an outstanding minor bug in iD should not affect validity of your proposal. Duja (talk) 08:27, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Discourage way-sharing between admin boundaries and other types of way

Removing tagging from a way that labels it as an admin boundary is likely to result in more sharing of ways between boundaries and other types of way such as highways, waterways and barriers (fences etc). Node sharing is maybe ok (if appropriate) but "improvements" to shared ways tend to result in inaccuracies in the boundaries in cases where the (invisible) boundaries are sourced from definitive data. So I would like to see this proposal linked to a reaffirmed commitment to not share ways between (admin) boundaries and other objects. --Csmale (talk) 17:09, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback, I have made this change. --ZeLonewolf (talk) 23:29, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

"no known data consumers that rely on boundaries tagging on member ways"

See Talk:ÖPNVKarte#Boundaries_tagged_as_relation_only_are_not_shown Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 22:22, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Yep, at the time I wrote that, I believed it to be true. Hopefully the ÖPNVKarte people will be able to update. --ZeLonewolf (talk) 22:25, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Would be OK to update that part? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 22:33, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Sure, feel free to take ownership of this issue and/or proposal --ZeLonewolf (talk) 22:36, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

As you probably noticed, I hope that it is doable via discussion without going through an explicit vote. Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 23:04, 5 February 2021 (UTC)