Hello Will,
I will not disregard, and I hear you.
So, for future edits I will adapt the wording.
What do you think about this: "ele wrong by a factor of about 3, which hints at feet figures put into the OSM elevation meter field that requires meter values. Feet figures obviously create havoc and pollute the OSM data."
This avoids the term "vandalism" but clearly states the severity of the issue, I think. Your thoughts?
My edits have not been triggered by the post in the link you quoted. But my use case suffers similarly: I am the guy building the world maps for openandromaps.org. And for increasing zoom levels I highlight more and more peaks based on their isolation. You can imagine what happens when you have a mix of meters and feet elevations in a region ...
A hill of 300m mapped as 900 something will blank out a real mountain of 800m. e.g. invalidating my map highlighting.
I would agree that most people who input feet figures do that ignorant of the consequences. (Although it's not SO hard to know that most of the world uses metric measures and to imagine that a transparent mix of both leads to pollution of the database. But let's assume they are just focused on feeding more into OSM, which is good per se; hence vandalism is not an appropriate term for those authors. I bet, though, that there are folks who know well, but feel "imperial" enough to give a sh.. about it. For those my term is even to friendly. But from looking at a peak node we cannot tell about the attitude of the respective author ...
Hence my agreement to adapt the wording for future comments. Can you pls. advise re. my proposal above?
TXs and cheers
Michael

