SHARCRASH (2022-07-01 12:55:50+00:00): Hi,

The "landuse=farmland" in your example https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/974591622 and any other merged one is still shown. No portion on the map has been deleted geospatially. So I don't see where the issue is.

All in all, the following arguments explain why I find those adjacent multiple fields tagged equally not being relevant, not useful, even deceiving. What I do is certainly not vandalism and in fact good practice. 

What's the point of separating/keeping a big farmland in smaller parcels if there is no tag difference? The elements i merged didn't have any. If they had different crops detailed, i would find that relevant and very useful but there were none. Let's even assume someone wants to add the crop=* tag, if you check Geoportail.lu aerial images from 2020, they are actually the same crop.

If someone gives me the argument for parcels, sorry I don't find that neither valid since OSM is not a land registry. As analogy, OSM contributors neither split residential plots, even if there is a retail store on the ground floor of a big building but the rest of them are apartments. 

In terms of data, it's the same situation if several portions of highways are split with the same tags. It is useless to keep them separated for nothing and even considered a bad practice, so merging is good practice for future edits. It's multiple nodes on a straight way, I would delete them as suggested in https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice#Keep_straight_ways_straight I consider this useless data duplication. Deleting/merging them results with the same map rendering, just less data to process (ways id, nodes id and connections) that has been to be taken into account on rendering for vectorised maps. Small portable devices can't handle countless polygons. It is not only less data for devices or OSM's servers, which have each year issues of infrastructure needs, but also less data to handle for contributors who will update. Subsequently...

Mostly why I do this it is because fields are not fixed entities. Farmers have agricultural techniques to rest and develop soil's nutrients and they also adapt fields to demand depending how the year sold. So accordingly they change the plot sizes and crops time to time (yearly or bi-annual). Many contributors leave so many fields without any difference for so many years. In the meantime, the field structure has changed. So if people care about this separation without checking reality, they will rather be misled. 

I don't expect you to believe me blindly, normal. So here is an example with a field I know and left untouched despite it has been merged for the same crop in real: This field was plotted at v1 a year ago https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/873210020/history It existed in real until 2018 (go wonder why tomolobla did so in 2020, it's one of the reasons why I went in conflict with him). Then on Geoportail.lu summer 2019 photos (careful, not photos from winter in early 2019) and until now, it has been merged in a big monoculture with https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/873210015 https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/873210022 and https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/873210010 . Even the fence on N between the present meadow in OSM and the farmland doesn't exist anymore. So if I follow the "do not merge field" inexistent rule, I can't merge the monoculture... Absurd!

I'm not forbidding anyone to map, I'm totally leaving room for other mappers and I welcome them. What woodpeck wrote in that block is irrelevant as I explained already. I was not bad-mouthing, but denunciating with facts how that user was making the map deceptive. I gave the proofs for that. As a user of the map too, it is normal for me to enhance or correct whatever I cross, as suggested in https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice#Do_correct_errors . As you can see, I am very communicative with others. Not like some contributors who report someone else for futile reasons. Sorry to say this but this is childish. They assume OSM is their property. There are far bigger issues which in real mislead people. For example the imports from the EU - SOeS, CORINE Land Cover, 2006 polygons in FR or BE! There were some of those in LU too suggesting there is a certain landuse somewhere but it was misleading. Some even overlap conflicting areas. For example
- https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/208529088 cemetery overlapping with inexistent forest or https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/248373788 a building over what seems not being at all residential area https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/67369293 expand even over meadow fields, scrubs, woods... This is the type of inconsistency that you, as part of the DWG, should care and fight for in order to avoid misleading users who check the deceptive map. I never reported those because I know how things are with other contributors, so I just correct as I've been doing on the FR side recently. But if you really start on that path, be prepared to receive countless reports from me. I will expect you to fulfil them equally since they will certainly be considered to be more serious and problematic.