Lee Carré (2021-07-28 18:12:28+00:00): This became a soap-opera rather quickly in my absence. Sigh.

If I had the time & motivation, I'd do a point-by-point rebut to each questionable statement, but I feel that such effort would be wasted on someone who presumes to know best.

I notice much buck-passing & denial / rejection of any kind of responsibility-taking on the part of Friendly_Ghost. Along with a recurring theme of ‘not my problem, someone else should figure it out for me’.

Nothing prevents one from making a copy of the DB, with whatever changes, and publishing separately. One could even make a business-model out of supplying OSM data which has gone through some kind of extra processing.

No-one has argued against consistency. The contention is over what's deemed to be canonical, how that's decided, and that it be the collective decision of the whole community.

An attitude of ‘dealing with other people takes too long, so fuck it I'm just gonna make sweeping changes as I see fit anyway’, besides other issues, is how edit wars start (and people get sanctions on their account, like a timed block).

If one has such a compelling case, then it should be easy to persuade others of its merits. To shun this casts doubt & suspicion.

Discord; to avoid the usual lengthy freedom-respecting vs. user-subjugating spiel, I'll keep this blunt; Discord is proprietary, and is at odds with the philosophy behind why OSM came to be. I contribute to OSM because of valuing the principles of libre (especially copyleft) info (data, software, media, whatever). So, expecting me to be a guest on someone else's server, which is set up as a private walled garden, requiring proprietary software and a one-sided contractual agreement (to which I simply can't agree), in order to discuss a libre-data project like OSM … well, that's highly contradictory.
Discord is not open to all. Therefore I don't see how it can be ‘community’. A mailing list, however, is fundamentally different.
But, to preempt some common fallacies (since they seem popular in this discussion), I am not at all against IM-style communications. However, for me, it would have to be a libre system (e.g., IRC, XMPP, Matrix).
There are practical considerations, too; while real-time channels might work well with a group of friends, it doesn't scale well when folks are all in different timezones (unless those in other timezones are also expected to forego sleep, in order to adapt to the demands of individuals who prioritise their own convenience) and who have differing amounts of time to engage (store & forward comms makes it easier to read discussions-of-interest while one was elsewhere, and to then reply selectively to relevant parts).
Mentioning that some private venue is more popular is the epitome of a logical fallacy, and therefore irrelevant.

If one's own time is of concern, then learning how to script the process (automation isn't necessarily full-blown software development) would seem in interest. Especially when doing it properly (bounding boxes of sane dimensions) takes 4-6 times longer than the several hours for a singular global changeset.
The time spent learning how to automate is a one-off, but the savings are recurring. Thus, the returns compound (or whatever the inverse of diminishing returns would be).
To rule it impossible (while insisting on continuing with an existing questionable process) because of not knowing how rather begs for the obvious retort; learn.
Otherwise it's akin to saying; sorry, Officer, I don't know how to keep the car driving straight, so me colliding with cars in other lanes is simply unavoidable. I'll give you one guess as to how tolerant said Officer will be to such an attitude of ‘I dunno how, so others will just have to deal with it’. I assure you, he'll find an effective solution to stop your collisions much more rapidly.

As for automated edits; there is good reason why they're discouraged. It's easy to make faulty assumptions in one's comfy armchair, compared to facing the reality of what one finds during survey and trying to figure out the least-bad way to encapsulate this in OSMs data model. As someone who lives on a small independent island, which has changed nationalities several times, I oft encounter quite weird head-scratcher situations, which simply don't fit into the anticipated categories of whatever proposal might have made sense for a larger jurisdiction. This is one of the reasons, I imagine, behind textual tagging; it's flexible, to allow for unanticipated cases.

This whole ‘the real-world planet should conform to my idea of how OSM tags should be used’ is backward.

I entirely relate to the desire for a well-ordered dataset, I really do. Problem is, the world is messy, ad-hoc, changed incrementally rather than via grand-plan.

To be dismissive of these truths, is going to alienate others.

To essentially disregard the concerns of others, and stick to one's presupposition, isn't intellectually-honest, or compatible with community. One might even argue that disregarding the community is anti-social, which is at odds with a social project.

I'm reminded of Thomas Sowell; there are no solutions, only trade-offs.

Especially to then ignore the effects of one's own actions, and insist on continuing, and that others do work to make it easier for you … well, hang on, you're the one making the agamgdpg and expecting to continue. How's that anyone else's responsibility? Other people have their own affairs to deal with. If you don't have the time to learn to improve (even if only for your own benefit), then how can you expect others to have copious free time to provide you with the benefit of their learning to be more efficient (at their own cost)?

Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man how to catch his own fish and he'll eat for a lifetime.

Why should other engage (let alone indulge or enable) when you're unwilling to (in good faith)?

As happened, it's so much easier to write you off as arrogant. After all, can't reason with unreasonable people.

It's sad to see that this changeset discussion wasn't all that constructive or productive. Especially since the original request (to not have my local changeset list full of irrelevant spam due to enormous bounding boxes of careless / thoughtless changesets) was really quite simple.

My concern for Friendly_Ghost is that he'll have hours of work simply reverted, and that further persistence will yield exponentially-longer blocks.
It is clear that he has enthusiasm, even if it may be misdirected.

Might I suggest, Casper, to survey your local area. Fix obvious blunders (e.g. the type of retailer is wrong, or such), add missing features (amenities & small ways) & details (like opening hours, etc.). This would likely be treated as far more valuable. Plus, as surveyor, unless someone else surveyed it around the same time, it would be difficult to argue against the nature of the changes you make (even if they critique your choice of how to tag things).

Maybe once The People's Map rivals the proprietary ones in terms of completeness & up-to-date accuracy, then we can spend hours having academic arguments over the minutiae of tagging (and I say that as one who thinks that colour should be spelled with a U, but that's not the point here).

In this case, re usefulness to dataset-parsers (since they're not consuming the data, but copying & using it in order to produce something else); a bit of RegEx makes the whole colour vs. color entirely a non-issue; /colou?r/
Boom, done; matches both, and then one doesn't have to care which spelling mappers input.
While my next point may sound harsh, I feel it necessary to drive home the lesson; if you knew even a little bit of background re scripting, possibly programming, and other things relevant to automating your workflow, then this would've been apparent to you. Yet, your dismissive refusal to even consider it, and persist with a very manual process … well, it just looks silly.
I say this out of kindness and sympathy. I imagine you didn't intend to appear foolish. Yet, that's part of what likely led others to conclude arrogance; presuming to know best, while clearly oblivious to the basics of the non-problem you're trying to solve (at least with this particular changeset). You also indicated that it took several hours of your time, yet perhaps you can now see how the utility of it is dubious (while adding load to the OSM servers, and increasing the size of the database).

Maybe others might know things which you don't. It would be wise to give benefit of doubt and listen (if only in order ten determine for yourself).
In the end, even though it's not their job to explain to you, they're not gonna be willing to try if you seem unreceptive.

Anyway. Another advantage of going outside to do surveying is that one has much less time (and is often lacking the inclination) to engage in InterWeb bickering.

If, instead, you wish to continue doing arm-chair mapping, then a would suggest starting small, setting review_requested=yes on your changesets, and learning the prevailing consensus that way.

For an example; I didn't start with iD (I've never used it); I started with StreetComplete (in offline mode, before I even had an OSM account), and paid attention to the changesets it uploaded to see what it was changing and how (peeking at the clockwork behind the face & dials of the pretty UI which only asked simple questions). Yet, I knew I was still contributing positively & constructively, even if I didn't yet know the details.
Then, once I'd groked the basic schema of tagging, I ventured to using editors which didn't hide the details for the cases which SC didn't handle, but still very much sticking to tagging (no adding ways or even nodes) and possibly correcting the position of glaringly mispositioned PoI nodes. All this while still heavily using SC (partly because any tagging mistakes weren't directly my own blunder, but the result of how SC was programmed; I trusted that the developers knew better than me how things should be done (and suspected that this was way it was possible to only change some things, but not everything; maybe those other things had no clear consensus on how it should be done), and later learned that there's quite a lot of consensus-gathering which goes into SC quest-design).
Only as I've become more confident & familiar (being less of a clueless newbie, by starting to correctly figure things out for myself, while still checking the wiki to be sure) did I start adding or modifying ways, adding PoI nodes, and using editors like Vespucci slightly more than SC (when it was clearly more efficient to make many related changes in the same set with Vespucci than the way SC would've done things.

Rinse & repeat, for each stage, progressing toward becoming proficient.

Notice the pattern, here. Notice what's conspicuously absent, too.

Making a global change, early on, seemed very naïve. Also arrogant to assume that somehow I had noticed a problem which others hadn't, on such a scale. What was more likely was that such as easy & obvious problem would've already been fixed. Thus, since it exists, there's likely some non-trivial reason why it hasn't been solved of which I'm unaware. Thus, I should leave it alone until I've ceased being clueless newbie for quite a while, rather than diving in because of assuming that the only reason must be because all other contributors are lazy fools.

Especially that this is a global change; two of the core principles of OSM are local knowledge (people contributing data from the area they call home) and a map for the community (rather than controlled by some far-off centralised corporation). To this end, people feeling like they have a sense of local ownership (while recognising & accepting that the data is for everyone), in the sense that they are the authorities of what's in their local environment and thus should be on the map, plus that they have meaningful influence over how the map represents said environment (to account for culture & society, and how they might affect how data is interpreted) that mapping is BY then rather than done TO them, is vitally-important.
So, when someone comes along, from afar, and basically tells them that their way is wrong and this is how it should be done (outside of the technical concerns of a database of tagged nodes; it's not a free-for-all), simply isn't gonna sit well or be taken kindly.

I had an example of this, a while ago. I'll keep the specifics vague, because it's not about them, but the general point re social effects.
So, a non-local mapper had added the outlines (from imagery) of a bunch of buildings. Normally this is helpful, and I wouldn't complain. However, they had all been tagged as the same specific type (rather than just building=yes to await a local to do a survey). This collection happened to be within easy walking distance for me at the time. However, when I was there, the assumption of building type / purpose was clearly wrong in several cases. Very wrong (not simply variation on same type, but an entirely different type). Since the tag wasn't building=yes, I couldn't simply use SC (which would've been quick & easy to do the lot of them), and much correction had to be done in a more capable editor, which took more time.
Later, after doing all that, I commented on the original changeset to point out the problem.

The contributor who added the outlines said that (from imagery) they looked like a typical set of the type he assumed they were, as was common elsewhere.

And there's my point; yes, fine, elsewhere. But the place he was drawing from is different to my island (yes, mine, because I'm as local as it gets). Quite a few things are different, here.

His presumptive attitude was irritating, especially that correcting the results had taken much more time than had he just set building=yes. I (less bluntly) explained this, too, and the benefits (e.g. SC quests) of not assuming.

I also pointed out how much longer it took, and that there's only 2 locals who do any (recent, regular) surveying (so our survey time is naturally precious).

Had he done the minimum, I would've been delighted, because it was fair amount of work, which would've helped out the handful of locals quite a bit (as has been the case when others have traced a bunch of building outlines). But, the assumptions made my survey take several times longer than otherwise, which made it a problem. Enough of one for me to remark on the changeset.

So, I hope you might see why smaller changesets and working WITH (local) communities is preferable to what amounts to a glorified global search-and-replace sting-manipulation exercise, which for many would've delivered the message of ‘you're mapping your own environment wrong’.

Anyway, that's plenty of food for thought, I'm weary of explaining what I feel is (or should be) obvious, and need a break from this petty squabble for another several days.