[Imports] How good can an import be?

[Andy Allan]

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 7:44 PM, Tyler Ritchie <tyler.ritchie at gmail.com> wrote:

>  low population density over much of the US and Canada, etc.

Ah, the old population density issue, it comes up every time. Sure,
there are vast areas of the US with low population density, but that
would only explain low levels of activity in sparsely-populated
stretches. Throw a 20km radius around most people in the US, and
you'll find they have a local population density similar to urban and
rural areas in Europe. So why is OSM gaining traction less quickly in
urban and suburban areas of the US? Country-wide population density is
a distraction from whatever is really going on, and annoyingly is
often used as an excuse for blanket-importing data even in urban and
suburban areas.

> But we could still benefit from national park, forest, sanctuary boundaries;
> state park, public lands, various trails/access roads that are difficult to
> efficiently survey (tree covered, in ravines); NHD or more accurate river
> datasets; addresses; building polygons from LIDAR...

And we could certainly use all that data to help improve the map, but
using external datasources isn't a binary choice of import or ignore -
there are other options that can be explored. I'm not suggesting that
we map everything with GPSes out on the ground, but I strongly believe
importing data is detrimental to growing the community. Of course
that's unprovable, but I believe there's only so many correlations
before causation can be reasonably suspected.

Cheers,
Andy