Maybe I was armchair mapping from a satellite or heat map or county records, my source of that segment might be hazy. My work in OSM has improved over the last five years, I'll say. The tagging changes and evolves, too.

I do respect private property and signage as I see it when hiking or biking. That day I was cautious and had prior property owner permission in the area. They almost asked me to lunch with them on a fresh pizza coming out of their oven, I was anxious to get hiking after explaining my GPS to the curious and inquisitive grandmother there.

Regards,
SteveA

Well, I recall that segment as "finding my way back across some other people's private property" and I was simply blazing a trail back to "a road, any road" so that I could find my way back to Long Ridge Road.

Done!

SteveA

Some very nice people live there, they opened up their land to me and whispered about paths into Demo. What I literally stumbled across, I documented. What you found you documented!

I think it's cool we do this mapping. We do this on public land, a public forest, actually, which is a sort of agricultural industrial zone, often changing, a bit treacherous in places and I think we both agree, difficult to tag accurately!

We both do a good job as we tag here, especially after reading your comments. However, we likely want a "more gentle" sac_scale rating here, shall we leave off "demanding?"

I don't know if you know that "skid trails" are used in production forests like this with that nomenclature meaning a particular sort of rough right-of-way/trail. Yes, it is 100% construction zone in the Demonstration Forest: rough and changeable everywhere!

Happy mapping,
Steve

I disagree that this is a route=mtb as way too much of it is on roadway and mtb is on surface=dirt or gravel or otherwise off-road.

You might also mean that it is a snowmobile or ski trail, which means this is also tagged wrong. You might want to read our wiki on route=piste or others. In short, please remove or modify the route tag here, it is incorrect.

It may also be that off-road segments need to be kept in this route and on-road segments put into a network=rcn route it is on-road bicycle portions of a route. Please fix this, even if it means discussing what might be done right here. SteveA

Thanks for your good answer.
SteveA

Hi SikeMo:

Usually pretty nice work on your (closed!) bike trails. However, now there are two parallel Dark Monsters, and I'm not sure which is which.

One of them is Dark Monster, does the "other one" (don't know whether I mean east or west) have a different name?

Happy mapping,
SteveA

It's a good question, Andy, and it's nice to text with you in near real-time (I am a fan of your edits, you are dedicated!).

What you are asking is at an edge of history in OSM as a project: in this part of California circa 2008-2010, this is how large parks were imported into this part of California. OSM community was early (though effective) and the structure of it has grown much, as well as movement forward to "standardize" on "how to do parks."

As this (the semantics of "leisure=park" in OSM) truly is fluid, and you are correct to nail it down in our wiki. However, nothing in that wiki directly contradicts what we do here. So if you're asking for a history lesson of "how things have gotten tagged around here," there is one, I know some of it w.r.t. this park, and there is an explanation for it. I know there are newer ways of doing things, the situation remains a bit fluid.

In short, this IS a park, we truly must make our wiki's semantic definition elastic enough to include this county park. Joseph Grant Park as it is now tagged in OSM meets that test. Might we agree there?

If you have more accurate or higher precision or both data, of course, bring 'em on and upload!

Is there a different tagging you prefer? OK, protected_area is getting to be all the rage for certain things, yes, I agree, and yet, JGP is a park. Right?

Again, great to make your acquaintance,
Steve

Yes, SHAPE_STAr and SHAPE_STLe are mentioned in the wiki. Look, this is an eight-year old import with data that are carefully curated, documented and promised to not only be updated (with v4) but also improved with the next version (via multipolygonization). In the initial import (messy as documented, but substantially improved by me) these tags were not a problem, as "foreign" tags in an import were not so much an issue in 2009 as they seem to be today.

If you really have a problem with these tags, propose what you wish to see happen. However, I'm telling you that they will substantially go away and/or improve in the next version of the updated import data.

I continue to say that there is not any issue here (that has not already been addressed in either the county wiki or this changeset discussion). Does there remain a problem? Thanks for any additional clarification you might offer.

As has become the custom over the years as our attitudes and conventions towards imports changes (and improves), these tags will be reduced or removed altogether in the v4 update to these data, anticipated in 2019 or 2020. As per the "Multipolygonization" discussion on talk-us in November and December of this year, it is likely that I will expend the effort to substantially multipolygonize these data during the v4 update.

No fixes necessary, they are part of an "official" (local government) import, now in its third revision since the initial 2009 v1 import.

See osm.wiki/Santa_Cruz_County,_California#Landuse

In this controlled discussion (on my part), the changes herein WERE indeed the subject: it appears not listening to them nor parsing their consequences is one of the blithely scattered activities of bdiscoe as he attempts to keep his scores high on the leaderboard while he preys on other under-mapped parts of Earth.

There is no "local preference for some unusual interpretation of OSM's tags" in Santa Cruz County: indeed, as noted by me and ignored by bdiscoe, landuse tagging is very well explained in our wiki as to its history (and thousands of corrections over many years), has gone through three revisions of improvements, and has won awards.

Instead, it is bdiscoe's apparent lack of understanding (or unwillingness to extend it) that landuse, natural and leisure tags are complex and can (and do) cause confusion among many OSM editors, wherein some think that because of what they see in Bing (landcover), those tags should supersede.

Again, I'll make my point (which bdiscoe never addressed): if bdiscoe has BETTER data to add here, he is welcome to do so. THAT is a tenet of OSM. However, he does NOT have such data and he wants to keep upping his stats, so that is the real reason he does not enter better map data here. Don't be fooled otherwise by what he calls a local unusual interpretation. We're just fine here, and always improving our tagging. Anyone remains welcome to do so, although a requirement that you bring to the table BETTER data does remain a requirement. Also required is basic knowledge between landuse and landcover, the root of bdiscoe's misunderstanding.

In the spirit of "pour calming oil over troubled waters," I offer that this dispute largely resulted from tangles among the complex issues of landuse and landcover. They are misunderstood, confusing and fraught with ambiguities. There are a plurality of tagging strategies and histories, not everybody is familiar with how fuzzy are the edges.

Landuse might be residential or farm or even both, as defined by how the property may be and is used (in a zone, in a legal sense). Landcover (like meadow, even though it is specified with a landuse tag) is different — or is it? Forest and wood tags make this even more complex. And rendering in mapnik/Standard and Carto are different still, with issues that help explain certain evolutions, allowing us better understanding of the complexities and histories.

There exist tagging strategies which are correct according to many, have evolved, yet still contain errors in the opinions of some and which others find confusing without some explanation or historical context: all at the same time. Our map is quite plural.

Landuse and landcover untangle slowly, it appears. Misunderstanding that what is seen in Bing as landcover doesn't automatically supersede existing correct landuse. It isn't one or the other and sometimes is both.

We do our best here, OSM evolves.

I wait no longer to do what I have known to be the right thing to do since this dispute began: I'm redacting bdiscoe's polygon removal edits.

Sadly, and I have never done this with any other OSM member with whom I have "friended," I also remove him as my friend in this project. His arrogance and hostility demonstrate themselves in his comments above, his User page boasts how he is more concerned with what are his "ratings" in OSM's "rank spreadsheet." These are not my values in this project, nor are they tenets of OSM.

Perfect data cannot be the enemy of the good, and good data cannot be the enemy of none whatsoever.

Adios, amigo!

The answer to who "foolishly" imported the SHAPE... attributes is nmixter. He has been hugely admonished for a very sloppy import here, and I have literally spent YEARS cleaning it up. EVERY SINGLE ONE of the >3000 polygons he imported was visually and personally redacted in JOSM by me in the "version 3 update" in 2014. If you are signing up to improving ALL 3000 polygons in our county, I'd like to see your plan to do so. But to randomly "nip at edges" that this one or that one is wrong, without fully understanding the history of the data that are here, you do yourself, OSM and our data in this county a huge disservice.

Regarding "fix the road topology," you will see (if you look, try http://product.itoworld.com/map/162?lon=-121.91947&lat=37.02996&zoom=12&fullscreen=true) that NOBODY has fixed more TIGER misalignments in this county besides me. By that Ito map, it is one of the most "blue" (corrected) counties in the entire state of California.

Our wiki even explicitly states that road are up to 100 meters off! Why are you so shocked that they are! This is not my fault, it was a messy TIGER import and we all know that. Yet, in eight years there are still some roads which are so remote and/or closed with gates and/or on private property and/or invisible from Bing or other imagery that they are nearly impossible to correct using those methods. Does that stop me from intending to do so? No. Does that mean that they should be wholesale deleted? Well, no again, yet I agree with you that these data should be corrected. But correct them with WHAT? You do not appear to have better data which superseded our already "OK" or "fair" data. So, keep your crayons in their box.

bdiscoe: Your hostile and hyperbolic comments that "there appear to be no actual data here, ONLY IMPORTS" and "largely fictional" are unwelcome, untrue and show you to be a histrionic exaggerator. I have been mapping this county (lovingly, carefully, with my GPS, notebook and tens of thousands of edits) for over eight years. PLENTY of people have looked! Santa Cruz actually won a BestOfOSM.org award for having "nearly perfect landuse!" Earlier this year, I was awarded OSM's Mapper of the Month award. I have spoken a number of times at SOTM-US national conferences. The university (my alma mater, where I work with many) uses OSM as its basemap. I constantly hike and bike yet more and more remote areas of this county and then generously contribute the highly accurate data to OSM.

What you propose is fantasy wishful thinking: you say "fix the road topology" like a magical super-edit is going to come along and suck the knowledge/data out of the ether and plunk it into our map. Nonsense! We have county landuse and we have on-the-ground data (over many years, refined with many versions) and both together are pretty good (we win awards, speak at our national conferences and are named mapper of the month) and they CONTINUE to improve as I and others around here hike and bike yet more.

You haven't answered my questions: what is the source of your better data? Do you live here? Is this your backyard? Have you ever even set foot in Santa Cruz County? I have lived here most of my life, have hiked and biked most of this county and mapped much of it, with the help of many others.

I'd like to invite you to stay out of editing in this county: your hostility and attitude are unwelcome, your data is NO better that what we have here (you continue to fail that you can't prove that) and I'd like this comment thread to come to an end with your declaration that you might not like our data, but you haven't any BETTER data to contribute, so you won't edit here.

Kindly, SteveA

However, if you "expand the wood" (e.g. as it appears you have from the east side of Happy Valley Road to its west side), you truly break many landuse semantics as published by our County GIS: landuse=forest really is timberland, natural=wood originated from "special_use" polygons which have a specific purpose but which are largely wooded. Do you really believe that you can use Bing (and a guess and a prayer) to better define landuse than does our County GIS department?

Well, thanks for that; I'm watching. It's possible we posted Comments so temporally close together that we crossed each other, but I do await answers to my questions. Thank you in advance. SteveA

I don't think there is anything terribly wrong with meadow overlapping with other landuse, and nobody has said so in Santa Cruz County, where we have been doing this for at least 8 years. Look at Wilder Ranch State Park, what many have called "visually pleasing" (meadow overlapping with landuse=forest, landuse=wood and leisure=park). The history is complicated, the rendering is complex, it has evolved to be this way over quite a long period of time and with a great deal of discussion and consensus.

Have you READ our County page, as I have recommended? There is quite a bit of history here, by locals, using local data, over many years — for most of the history of OSM as a matter of fact. I don't edit San Ramon (though I know Danville, Pleasanton and Livermore fairly well and have mapped there), but to simply redact official landuse data and berate local convention doesn't sit well with many here.

Regarding removing a wrong "D" well, I'm OK with it if you can justify doing so (and you haven't, except to say "it is a total mess.") So that doesn't fly right from the start. But you didn't replace "wrong D" with A, B and C which are correct. If you do so, I'm OK with that. But you haven't. Since you use the word "re-created," I await your re-creations. Do you intend to recreate A, B and C or will you just redact without any improvement? If the latter, I will restore the polygons, perhaps this time as landuse=residential instead of landuse=farmland, as our local wiki suggests. (It predicts that they may oscillate between these, they have and they do, as contributors indeed "improve" them).

Why you would say that larger landuse polygons are "inaccurate to the point of being completely useless and inaccurate?" Our wiki states "consensus (has) emerged of capturing zoning with landuse=* is a good first step to avoid large blank areas, but when actual on-the-ground data are also known, they are preferred to simple zoning (landuse)=*." DO YOU have any actual on-the-ground data to contribute to IMPROVE what you have redacted? If so, do so. Otherwise, please leave our perfectly valid "good first steps" in place. The notion that these discourage better data is nonsense: rather, you (and/or other OSM contributors) appear to be lacking in better data with which to do so.

SteveA

You are welcome. Although I don't quite understand what it is that you are either missing or that you require to further complete whatever it is that you are trying to do.