Not sure what the 'personal aesthetic preference' comment is intended for; it seems more of an ad-hom than anything I put forward. I have laid out reasons that this imported data is of low quality but you seem to ignore this by saying it was 'done by professionals' which is neither here nor there as far as OSM is concerned.

There are no 'powers-at-be' here. There is community discussion and if needed the DWG will assist with technical things like reverting or dealing with copyright infringement.

This discussion has nothing to do with 'questioning practices in science,' and everything to do with data quality (and respect of the import process).

These imported features are not connected and most importantly not bounded by anything representative of reality. They leave large gaps for no reason at all. I could recreate 'landcover polygons' of similar quality by painting with watercolor and running it through an automated classifier.

You say that this is not an import but it by definition is. Regardless, the community guidelines are to consult with the local (and larger) mapping community before importing large quantities of data into OSM. You did not do this, either by following the admittedly odd Import Guidelines or by simply asking "does anyone have problems with importing this data."

You also seem fixated on the idea that one must have physically been somewhere to have any say in how it is mapped. Obviously this is not the case or a project as vast and awesome as OSM would not be able to exist at all. My local areas sometimes get mapped by users in Europe or Asia, but if they aren't mapping incorrectly who am I to call them out for it. I often map in foreign countries like Mozambique, but more local mappers do not delete my edits simply because I've 'never been there and couldnt possibly verify whats there.' If you need me to find a central Texan mapper that wishes the data removed I could probably do that, but I doubt it would actually solve anything.

I stand with my previous statement that this data should be removed from the map; I think we've learned enough from NHD without adding this weird NLCD stuff to more counties.

Since I've received no response and you've continued editing I'm just going to delete this as having no basis in any source I have access to.

Why is everything a driveway though...

From what did you trace way/197577396? It definitely wasn't from Mapbox, and doesn't match anything on any other imagery source.

They're minor_line, not high voltage, and they provide power to the billboards so they must somehow. If you want to map it more correctly by mapping individual underground connection wires or something feel free

A few small notes on road classification; tertiary doesn't just mean 'next road from secondary,' it's usually still a connector road that gets a lot of traffic. For example, way/15642992 is a residential road (that turns into a barely existent track at the end) not tertiary. See also way/15640839 which is probably best as a service (also note the wonderful TIGER spam tags). Also the County Refs out here probably belong in unsigned_ref tags because I don't think you can navigate by them.

the Esri Clarity stuff is really old but regular Esri is usually within a year or two. NAIP loads really slow for me

Ok sounds good, at least you're working on it. Sometimes mappers just dump a block of forest and leave it lol.

I'm also doing landcover in the area but I'll try to leave space so we don't end up duping areas.

As for imagery, try to use the Esri (not Clarity) layer; it uses mostly Maxar but they align it better. Bing is also very pretty in some areas here but doesn't have full coverage.

There was already a fire station, why did you add another one? I've removed the duplicate

Hey ottwiz,
is this landcover an import or something or was it traced from the NAIP imagery? It doesn't really seems to align to anything except some small sections of it.
Unless you plan on updating it I think it needs removed because of how inaccurate it is.

scuffed changeset comment

Please stop. I'm not sure what 'line' you are changing to 'natural=coastline', but you are adding coastline tags where there is no coast for at least 200 miles.

I'm going to try to remove this and hopefully it doesn't flood Canada or something.

why did you add hundreds of useless address tags to nodes?

definitely should have been reverted but it's too mixed up now

Hi,
Why did you make this change? I had just created a boundary relation that includes this and a bunch more ways that you missed by just changing the tags on this.

Fixed in changeset #92779234

Hi,
Please be aware of the imagery dates you are using. Esri/NYS in this area are from 2015. A lot has changed since then.
way/833339235 for example, does not exist anymore; check out NAIP imagery which shows the new Aldis which you mapped over.

*Language name without default name

Hi,
Are you aware of the poor quality that comes with importing the MS building dataset? For example, the following buildings do not exist anymore
way/842901556
way/842901557
way/842716857

Some have the MS buildings source tags while others do not; if you are tracing from the Esri Clarity layer please be aware that it is from 2010 and much has changed.

It looks like the capture date for this area is actually 2017, and for the westernmost four islands of Adam's Bridge it is sometime before 2016.