Govanus (2015-08-17 20:29:22+00:00): ok managed to get back on today I tried fri but only had 10sec to close!

I've thought a lot about your comments and have the following possitive views and ideas:-

With regard to the spercific point about dealing with building outlines and addresses.
  There seem to be others very intrested in basic trace outlineing and basic addressing.  So I tend to let them have there way a lot.  ..but then I come and use these as a basic starting point for refinement and detailing sorting out bay windows coloumns  porches and other small building features.  I look at garden gates paths hedges lawn and flowerbeds to give a nice look to end maps that want to use these features. I look for parking spaces and garaging (including details on markings nameings and owner details posted at the site).  I try to flesh out yards, forecourts, driveways  and other potentialy missed service roads. I look for still exsiting back alleys and footways that have benn more common then most maps and arial photos can show {think tree cover near back gardens linked with narrow passages close to buidings originaly filmed from a slight angle etc.} I cross referance with other sources to get a feal for how things have developed - which helps me interpert things i servey with a greater appretiation (so I can make sence of the scuby patches of no-mans land that you occasionaly see in places, and where owners are seeking greater rights to land than they actualy have).

I tand to focus on a workable patch till its mostly done and then move on until the entire map is complete.  [but it might seem confused from this as I try to multiplex a lot of acitities to run at the same time so the edits look more scattered and half finished a lot {see my diary entry on the subject for some time back}.
I did have a focus on the "gleb-lands" at the western point of southpark about a year ago and spent a few months resuching, visting and compiling servey notes, several sessions at work drawing everything and continuing long into the evening after work too. I'd even been writting in the help qu.'s wiki system about area highways and used Wingfield street as a ilistrating example as I just done the sidewalks part of cross street and morrell Avenue ready for the ubern treesand grass borders along Morrell Avenue. I'd also compleated the carrageway that stops short in Wingfield street and begun on the parking options at the site. along with this most of  the houses and other building on that block I'd drawn so I could add NPLG:UPRN's to all of them (involing canvusing bins on several bin-days).

Then https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/22641522 saw lots of the sidewalk areas important at the side of 77 St. Clements {yes I have stared at those fadeing house names for ages to work them out completly} removed along with other highway areas and address points with floor details for flats and seperated for gazzeter compilers (ok its sketchey at the moment but thier is a aimm to be able to have open-souce adderess lists available from this work and questions about it regulary come up in the help questions.

The deletions were done aledgedly on grounds of "style"!!!!!!

I was so upset that I abondoned work on inputing data about the 105 St Clements flats that I'd just surveyed and decided not to map that area anymore. only recently did I do the odd part of the north side morell ave, some house names in St clementsand some glaring omisions of nhs places etc. but I intend to skip this place mainly.

ok I said this was to be mainly positive so the good news is I focus on those buildings and address especialy tring to find hmo's and flat numbers [see indoor diray notes on this too]
===
Interior levels make sence when tring to work with buildings that have multiple addresses withen them (which is pretty common in oxford and especially so in the south east part I did a lot of work in) most shops have several domestic flats or bedsits a lot of small blocks of flats are common inthe new builds and even two surgeries in Manzil Way have few floors of flats on top.  the shopping centres all have independant offices on the upper floors and two have schools and branches of goverment in them.  So It stands to reason that I'd try to map these in a stacked indoor type approach: and if it was up to me then the land use tags would be overlapping all over the place. I think indoor tagging can bring clarity to the situation, though my efforts are thwated a lot by editor non-support for node stacking properly.  Each layer is vertually mapped seperatly from the rest but a lot of verticle cueing occurs because of load bearing walls, stair and lift wells, and riser couboards.

Competitor Goggle has experiments of indoor and 3D mapping in oxford possibly inspired by when OSM is doing I can see them chaseing some of the featues I add sometimes which is intreasting.  Bing seems to have abondoned vertical mapping accuracy at times to give useful "bird's-eye" at angle views that I use a lot (for being shapper and a good cueing transition from ground surveys).

===

"micomapping" is not potentially any more confusing to edit for the next person if take a good approach.  Theres more going on so the detail level is higher and more things to be consider when you move stuff about.

editors can help improve things if they look out for vertical tags on features and try not mangle together features automaticly.  Nodes at first waren't automaticly conected and this gave problems in the pas when people forgot to connect ways at junctions [messingup automated routers] so node auto mergeing became the standard but then people objected to stacking because there automerging editor didn't work with it and error checkers for missed nodes Said "That is wrong" assuming they were missed junctions. ..but the underlying database can take stacked features and indoor mapping makes them increasingly common.  So this automerge is more of a problem than a solution and needs to become switchable.  For novices editors could look out for verticle tags [like: level, roof:level, layer, alt, hight etc] and avoid blindingly auto merging those feature and there nodes especilly of course operators should have the option to make a merge as an edit but the editor should alert the operator about the tags and potentail problems.  id online editer already has a new feature type filter system & JOSM has a less automated filter system {at least probably on the version about a few hundered behind the current that I last used a month ago!}

Before retagging if you're in id you are often offered basic help on the wiki
I think I'm probably writing too much but then it reflects that I thought too much too ;)

==

I think clearer standeds  with logical extension options for unforseen situations is something that is very important {especialy for new people} {but also ways to guide older mappers to look at aggreed schema changes specially for les familer new feature details}.

 as I try to make all my entries conform to the wiki (sometimes I even extend it for new tags I need to create - highway=monuvering_forecourt for instance):
 but the wiki isn't oftern stable with new features common in micromapping so it's not uncommon to find multiple methods [great minds think a like -but don't always talk to each other quick enough].  ..and it gets worse when people "think" they know another right way that isn't even in the wiki and alter others work to reflect this.

   The adage of not retagging stuff that isn't really wrong is a good one and common in a lot of the wiki pages.  The problem is that contributers add stuff to the database and then make up automated search and styling sheets to look for specific tags they left in the data, So that the infomation is picked up for their gazzetters, on-line maps, poster renders, Geographic locators and router systems.
   Now if people get into a habit of just changeing tags rather than actually suveying and correcting features that have real mistakes or things have altered at the site like new erections and shop changes.  Then other contributers are going to find there work going missing from there well planed systems; which is likely to be just going to annoy more people than it aids?

ok I've written a lot and not in the odder it is on the page so I'll summate and end.

editors avoid alway automergeing when vertical tags used.
standerds for new features need to be diseminated to all quicker so we don't waste time redoing each others work rather than getting on adding more detail and corrections to the map.

and indoor areaisation micromapping and other recently novel areas of OSM need to be seen as part of the whole and not avoided topics by mappers as they will increasingly be appearing all over the map and not learning about how they work might make problem edits occur in future.

==

OSM is growing and detail improvements are spreading across the globe.  Its going to be patchy for a while yet but if we all work to same "hymn-sheets" we will  achive more faster.

I'll leave with the following patch I was asked to work on https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/32961073#map=19/49.84911/2.88818
this changeset is the second of two I did after local mappers wanted some help.