[OSM-dev] Data source for robot

Matt Amos zerebubuth at gmail.com
Tue Oct 12 16:26:29 BST 2010


On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 3:48 PM, Peter Budny <peterb at gatech.edu> wrote:
> Matt Amos <zerebubuth at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Serge Wroclawski <emacsen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 3) The road to hell in OSM is paved with bot intentions.
>>>
>>> OSM has a long, negative history with bots. We have a very small
>>> number of good imports, and dozens (if not more) bad imports. Bad
>>> imports are so commonplace in OSM that within the OSM community, bots
>>> of any sort are discouraged, but especially any imports, and
>>> especially (as you appear to be proposing), merging existing data with
>>> imported data.
>>
>> +1
>>
>> bots and imports are also fantastic ways of washing away community
>> consensus for the ideas of a single person.
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_relations
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_Numbered_Highway_Relations
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Michigan/Highway_Relations
>
> Maybe I'm unclear what you mean by "consensus"?  Those look pretty
> agree-upon to me.

what i mean by "consensus" is "general agreement by a group of
people". but this doesn't mean everyone agrees and then bots go and
stomp over all the data. i mean the kind of consensus where each
individual mapper is editing in a way that makes sense to them and a
common system emerges. the very concept of a mass edit or bot is, by
definition, unilateral and not consensual.

secondly, just because something says "agreed" on the wiki doesn't
make it so. the wiki is for documentation and discussion of existing
tags. the real test of whether a scheme is "agreed" is whether it is
popularly-used - by many users, not by a small number of proponents
and bot-writers. have a look on tag[watch|info|stat] to see whether
these schemes are in use and encourage people to use them - provide
them tools and let them vote with their feet, rather than imposing a
unilateral "agreement" by bot.

cheers,

matt



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