Yeah, I’ve been pretty paranoid about saving all the time the last few days, because I keep running into those issues. By the way, try opening another copy of Potlatch in a different tab or window, to see if the changes actually went through regardless.

To follow up, recently there’s been talk on the U.S. mailing list of using a :historic suffix after certain keys, since the recent GNIS import added countless numbers of historical churches and schools without proper tagging (but often with “(historic)” in the name).

Also, if I remember correctly, Yahoo! gave explicit permission to use their aerial imagery for OSM. That may be one complication with using Google Maps.

I usually go with https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:tourism=attraction. Osmarender displays the label for attractions at lower zoom levels, which is nice.

Also, try reloading your browser. Sometimes your browser caches the tiles.

Thanks, Richard. Didn’t know about that one.

Typo: In Potlatch, you can select a node or way and then click on its ID…

In Potlatch, you can select a node or ID and then click on its ID (to the left of all the key/value pairs). That brings up a history box, where you can revert pretty easily. Unfortunately, there’s no way to bring it up for completely deleted features.

One more thing: if you follow the convention for marking up cycle routes, OpenCycleMap, will render the trail even at low zoom levels.

This page advises not to mark a way as both an abandoned railway and a bike path. But I’ve been mapping rail trails in Ohio, and cycleways also marked as abandoned railways seem to display as cycleways in all cases. So I don’t see any harm in doing that.

I also stuck the railroad’s name in the old_name slot.

The OpenRailMap hasn’t been expanded beyond the UK so far. Maybe once it reaches the U.S., they’ll have a nice way of rendering rail trails and abandoned tracks. Detailed print atlases tend to mark these things, anyhow.

You might want to consider using https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:railway=abandoned rather than deleting the railway outright. Some maps render the “course of an old railway” specially.

loc_name, by the way, is supposed to be what the locals call the river. So name would then be the official name.

There is the loc_name tag, but as far as I know, neither Mapnik nor Osmarender make use of it. Maybe the tag is used by the Name Finder service, though.

Power lines!

(power=line on a way, and power=tower on each of its nodes.)

Can someone please delete this spam diary entry and block the user?

There is edit history, and there’s a bit of debate about whether tiger:reviewed even matters anymore.

That would be awesome. It’s such a pain to tag all the towers in Potlatch right now. (I usually go through later and add the towers, using the repeat feature [R].)

Maybe the tiger:review=no tag shouldn’t be removed if you’ve touched less than 25% (or some other figure) of the way’s nodes? Basically come up with a system so that if you’ve edited a street and the entire street can be fit on a screen at zoom level 16, it’ll remove the tag.

While the online map viewers only have a few limited categories – like OpenCycleMap for bicyclists – the offline map editors are able to show and hide different layers, if I’m not mistaken.

What I often do with stubborn ways is to first remove all their tags, then remove all but the last two points, then shift the focus somewhere else to get the changes to save. Then, once that happens, I delete the rest of the points.