Karel, thank you for taking the time to respond to my question. I really appreciate it.

One of the things I’m trying to do is create guidebooks/charts of all the backcountry and lesser known areas that have legal airstrips. In places like Mexico, these are poorly documented, but there are spreadsheets and things you can compile from the govt to make the status clear. My dream is to contribute that data to OSM, then use that data to compile the chart/guidebook. Essentially use OSM as the source of truth, contributing to OSM the gaps.

Right now the current best practice for getting data like runway length/width from these areas is to simply look at google earth and measure it. It does not need to be perfect. It seems like marking the line that is a runway is a similar method to this if there are no direct measurements available, and it’d be impracticable (or trespassing) to measure it directly. Obviously when there is direct measurement, that’s better. But for now calculating the length gives us a guidepost that a pilot could use to filter what they should even consider going into.

I’d be curious if you had any suggestions on OSM best practices for getting this data. As well if there are ways for me to automatically generate changesets using these govt sources and then review everything all at once before contributing.

Please feel free to tell me to RTFM… I’ve found a lot of these materials on the wiki but it is unclear to me what the best practice/standard is… I was very surprised to see your post today when it is in contradiction to what the wiki for runway says. How does consensus on these approaches happen?

Thank you again for your time and thoughts.

Hello, I’m new with contributing to OSM, but I’ve recently made a handful of edits to runways in Baja Mexico. I’m a pilot trying to document some of the lesser known airstrips and correcting data nearby. One thing I do appreciate about the current line method is it is very easy to calculate length of the runway pragmatically. Following the instructions on the runway wiki page, I have been changing area tagged ways to area:runway per the instructions and adding a line for runway. Is having both a problem?