[OSM-dev] OSM front page design concept

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
> ok and then? who will pick it up and fix it?
> look at openstreetbugs and most could be closed right away. the feedback from most people is useless. a comment "footways are missing in this park" doesn't help much if there is no experienced mapper willing to survey.

While I am all in favour of enticing more people to lend their local 
knowledge to improve OSM (and I believe there is a *lot* we can 
harness), I must say that Apollinaris has a point here. Commentary on 
OSM from people who do not have a basic understanding of it tends to be 
worthless. It is not worthless all the time, but very often so. That's 
because if people cannot be made to understand that there is something 
like data behind the map, and the map will always show a selection of 
what's there, they are bound to mix up the following:

* data missing
* wrong data
* things left out on purpose on a specific zoom level
* properties of an object that have been mapped but are not shown
* things that have not been mapped because nobody is interested
* ...

Now we can either adopt a "free-for-all" approach where we encourage 
everyone to leave their feedback without spending 10 seconds on 
understanding how this map is generated, and then have a lot of work in 
post-processing (explaining to people that if they only had zoomed in 
further, the restaurant they were looking for would've been shown etc.) 
- or we can "crowd-source" this work by trying to educate those who wish 
to help, at the possible cost of turning away those with too small 
attention spans or too little technical aptitude.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"