ThePierrasse (2021-01-17 19:46:44+00:00): Hi there.

I’d like to find the best and quickest solution to this issue. I got very annoyed when I first saw the countless reversions you performed, mostly because I thought that that came without any warning at all, and that it was just a silly and unnecessary measure to carry through, but looking back at your original message, you did technically warn me about it, so I’m aware I kind of brought that onto myself.

Back when you first contacted me, I was very busy with work, which not only means that I didn’t really have time to reply, but even worse, that I didn’t even take time to read your message properly, as you can tell, hence my initial frustration. I guess it wouldn’t have required too much of my time to send you a reply, but I figured this was such a minor issue that I definitely could afford to wait the couple of stressful weeks that were ahead of me before I did it.

Anyway, this isn’t really the matter, and all I’m here for is for those reversions to be canceled and the previous versions to be put back as soon as possible. I say quick because other contributors have already been trying to manually fix those reversions by adding edits on top of it, like here https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/523808465/history for example, and I’m afraid this is going to lead to a huge mess if we wait any longer. Since you seem to be more accustomed to this kind of task than me, I’d like to kindly ask you if you could do it yourself. Otherwise, I guess I can figure it out myself too, or at the very least I can manually re-add everything, although that would really be a pain, but in any case I still need your approval anyway. I can review my edits to replace the Google tags if everything is set back to the way it was prior to the reversions.

Another reason why I got annoyed is because I’m failing to understand what you based yourself off to decide which edits to revert and which ones to keep. I haven’t really looked at the reversions in detail, but none of the ones I’ve seen were actually on elements that used Google tags. For example, I’ve seen a handful of nodes where you removed toponyms, but this is specifically some of the data that I would never get from Google, as they seem to be the best at botching place names. So if those reversions really have to stay put, I’d like to get at least some sort of explanation on why some of the content is affected when it shouldn’t.

Obviously, I can’t forget to address your initial remarks about the Google tags, otherwise this wouldn’t really be a reply. Yes, I’ve been very much aware for a couple of years now that I can’t use Google as a source, but I wasn’t back then, and that’s probably why these are three years old contributions. That said, it’s true that I often still fail to understand why putting “Google” in the references is considered copyright infringement, but I won’t elaborate on this otherwise I’ll still be there by tomorrow morning.
This is the reason why as a general rule, I now use “aerial imagery”, “gps” and “local knowledge” to tag my contributions, as it seems to be the fine line between respecting licenses and still properly referencing contributions. Btw, you say “local knowledge” is a perfectly good source for OSM, but to me it opens the door for anyone to make stuff up and be provided with a way to justify it, since you can’t really debate their “local knowledge”, so I’m not sure I 100% agree.

I hope you won’t mind this very lengthy answer, but I figured I was better off clearing everything out in one go. I must say I’m still a bit bitter, since I believe a more diplomatic approach (final warning or deletion of the problematic tags) would have worked better at this stage.

Regards,

ThePierrasse