[HOT] Could we get more out of our mappers by asking for less?

Russell Deffner russell.deffner at hotosm.org
Sun Feb 26 19:00:49 UTC 2017


On this topic, there has been concern over validators doing so much deletion of recently mapped objects.  This triggers a few monitoring sites that watch for 'suspicious changesets'; it doesn't mean much in the immediate, but thinking longer term for the OSM project, those algorithms could be used for automatic warnings or blocks.  I think no matter what, we're always going to be dealing with poor mapping, so we should also look at some best practices/rules of thumb for when to delete versus improve a previously mapped feature.  Although I do find myself deleting and re-drawing sometimes, I try to minimize that as there is something to preserving the original mappers contribution.  This can also be an issue for trying to calculate mappers contributions for a mapathon or project if a validator unnecessarily deletes the objects.

To quickly touch on project creation; I think roads and settlements/residential areas go well together - they both should be done with larger task squares than for building projects, but not sure it matters too much which one comes first, but for disaster response as an example, I would think roads and settlements are first priority followed by buildings.

Happy Mapping,
=Russ

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Buck [mailto:andrew.r.buck at gmail.com] 
Sent: Sunday, February 26, 2017 10:20 AM
To: hot at openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [HOT] Could we get more out of our mappers by asking for less?

> I think this is a different conversation, I would prefer mappers take a
> little more time and care, some buildings I've seen mapped have little
> relationship to the size or shape of the building.
> 
> Cheerio John

I agree on this.  Especially with respect to buildings.  Roads are
fairly easy to add refinements to by doing them one at a time and using
the replace geometry tool in JOSM, however poorly mapped buildings take
longer to clean up than simply deleting them and mapping them fresh.

I would rather see a user add 10 buildings that are high quality then
100 or even 1000 that have to be remapped by someone else.  Having to
map something that has already been mapped poorly by someone else is
really disheartening.  On the one hand you spend your whole time mapping
thinking about how your work is duplicating that of someone else, and on
the other hand you feel bad about removing their contribution from the
database.  So you get hit with it on both fronts.

-AndrewBuck






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