Hi,
I think deleting this building was an error. I added it after walking by the location in question a few months ago. It's clearly a building, you can see it from Bing Streetside imagery. The service way leads directly up to the rooftop (hence the parking=rooftop tag on the parking lot).
Best,
Will

Hi, I noticed in this and some other changesets, you've deleted the "nubs" I draw connecting the curb cuts to the sidewalks. I draw those on purpose to make adding curbs easier in the future. For example, see a case like node/8403520508, this style of mapping makes it clear that the raised curb is to cross the street, but if you stay on the sidewalk you can avoid it. Is there a reason you delete them?
Best,
Will

Hi, it looks like you've been taking a hack at the Farmland Mapping import. I personally find this welcome, as these polygons are a bit of a mess and they make working in rural CA difficult IMO. Would you mind describing in a little more detail what you are modifying in these changesets? Is it just upgrading tags or geometry too? The changesets are so big that they're difficult to assess using most of the tools.
Thanks,
Will

Hi, thanks for adding this new direction separation. Sorry if I reverted it improperly last time.

Please note for future reference that Google Maps is not an allowed source for edits on OpenStreetMap, as it's incompatible with their license: osm.wiki/Google. Have you seen this yourself on the ground? If so, a note in your changeset comment as simple as "confirmed via survey, although it doesn't yet appear in the aerial imagery" is all the proof you need to keep someone else from changing it back :)
-Will

Hi,
While I appreciate the desire for this elevator to render with an elevator icon, removing correct tags to force a particular rendering seems like "tagging for the renderer". See osm.wiki/Tagging_for_the_renderer. It looks like these elevators should properly be both "highway=elevator" and "railway=subway_entrance", since they are both subway entrances and elevators. It's up to the software designers to properly render valid tagging.
Best,
Will

Hi, in the future, I would appreciate it if you used the changeset comment to describe the change you made to the data, rather than just "[location] changes". See osm.wiki/Good_changeset_comments.

Moreover, I'm a little confused by some of the changes you've made in this and other recent edits. What was your rationale for removing railway=subway_entrance from many nodes such as this one? They look like subway entrances to me.

Hi, in the future please use the changeset comment to describe the edit you made, rather than repeating your name. For example, a good descriptive changeset for this edit would've been "Added speed limits to Santa Monica Boulevard". See osm.wiki/Good_changeset_comments

Heh, my hunch would be that no one is keeping very close track regarding the reasoning behind the striping, but I'd love to be wrong. At least in LA, I think the city has a website with the traffic count database, but I found it pretty hard to use.

Yeah Venice has a very strange history. The canals were apparently pretty run down for a while, which is why they paved some over, but the remaining ones have since been spruced up and are quite nice areas now.

The general rationale you said on how you look at tertiary roads sounds about right to me. I might go in and change a couple of the road classes in the area, but these sorts of subjective classifications are always going to be in the eye of the beholder in the end. I tried to write up my opinions on road classification in a diary post a while back, in case you might find it useful (at least, to see what someone else's interior diatribe on it might look like): @willkmis/diary/399345

I think center lines are a useful gauge, but in my opinion not every road with a center line deserves to be highway=tertiary. Some roads get center lines because they have high traffic, but others get them just because they're particularly wide or curvy, despite not providing much connectivity. You can see the standards CA uses here to decide if you're interested, see section 3B.01: https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/safety-programs/documents/ca-mutcd/rev6/camutcd2014-part3-rev6.pdf.

Some of the roads you've upgraded in Venice look like examples of the latter in my opinion. To me, Rialto, Market, Riviera, and Cabrillo all seem like residential roads: Abbot Kinney, Main, and Venice Way are more important through roads in the immediate area, whereas these roads don't really connect much and wouldn't be used except to get to the immediate abutting residences. They just all have center lines because they're particularly wide. There can be lots of weird reasons roads are wide despite getting little traffic; in this case I happen to know that it's because many of these roads are paved-over canals, and so the modern roads are the same width as those were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venice_Canal_Historic_District.

OK, it looks like you restored essentially the same paths that I had drawn in changeset/131867158, am I interpreting that right?

Yes, as a local to the area I can confirm that this golf course was recently remodeled. I traced off of the Bing imagery, which when I drew these paths, and still from what I can see, is the current alignment. I know this because I noticed when Bing imagery updated from the under construction course to the current paths.

Hi,
Is there a reason you deleted all the golf cart paths I added at Hillcrest Country Club? It doesn't really impact much but they did take some time to trace properly.
Thanks,
Will

Hi,
I was wondering what criteria you use to upgrade roads from residential to tertiary. Some of the roads you've upgraded here don't seem very "important" to me from a network perspective. As in, they just have normal residences and don't actually do any "collecting" as described in highway=tertiary.
Best,
Will

Looking through https://osmhv.openstreetmap.de/changeset.jsp?id=131618695, which is the best way I could figure out how to look at this, a few things stood out:
-Was this an error? Probably should stay pupuseria, maybe +salvadoran/ian/ean node/3939355534
-As with @oba_510, I question automatically changing korean_barbecue to korean;barbecue without retaining the original tag, as Korean BBQ implies a very specific type of restaurant with certain features, distinct from normal Korean or normal barbecue restaurants. This seems like data loss to me.
-It's unclear to me why "cuisine=tacos" is the standard form you've settled on, when all the other food item-style tags are singular, like sandwich or bagel.

I don't mean to be piling on, but while most of these changes seem to be welcome and obvious syntax and spelling corrections, some of them appear to me to go beyond that to defining a standard tagging where none exists, and I'm not sure whether they were really documented as such.

In general, for bulk edits like this, it'd be nice if you documented all the changes you were making, as such large edits are very hard to check via most quality assurance tools. I saw your diary post, but it didn't list any of the examples that have proven worth discussing here, for example.

On a different matter, it looks like you've, in an automated fashion, standardized all variants of Salvadoran, Salvadorian, and Salvadorean to "cuisine=salvadoran". What was your rationale? I looked into this tagging a little while ago and found that there wasn't much consensus, and all three spellings are listed as variants in most dictionaries.

I personally think it's more important that the cuisine titles all look the same, so that future mappers will use standard forms and not have to learn that California is the singular exception in the world.

I disagree with this assessment: even if it's sometimes called "California cuisine", phrasing the tag as a noun and not an adjective goes against OSM practice for other cuisines from certain localities, e.g. cuisine=chinese, mexican, french, southern vs. china, mexico, france, south.

Hey, thanks for pointing this out. Totally an error on my part, must've somehow autofilled it wrong in JOSM. Was meant to be "from=South Bay Transit Center". It's been corrected.

Hi, welcome to OSM. Please note that the description=* tag is not for subjective evaluations or advertising, and photo is not for logos, which is why I removed them earlier. See description=* for more information.
Best,
Will

Whoops, very odd typo here, should be "still need to add stops to relations"