[Imports] How good can an import be?

[Nic Roets]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 10:34 AM,  <steggink at steggink.org> wrote:
> Quoting Nic Roets <nroets at gmail.com>:
>
>> Let's compare the USA with the Netherlands:
>> Both had imports of the complete road network. Yet the ratio of users
>> registered on the wiki to population is one in 2 million and one in
>> one hundred thousand respectively.
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Users_in_United_States
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Users_in_the_Netherlands
>>

The ratio is 1:56000 for Germany and 1:250000 for the United Kingdom.

So these statistics indicated that the AND import did not hurt the
Dutch community.

> Maybe it's dangerous to say, but I think that the growth of the Dutch
> community has been negatively affected due to the AND import. The scale of
> the Netherlands is not comparable to the US and Canada, and I think it would
> have been feasible to have the road network in the country mapped completely
> one or two years ago. As a result, the Dutch community is relatively small,
> compared to the UK and Germany. Not that many OSM related events are being
> organized, and those who are organized often have a low turnout.

The question for me is not really if the German and UK communities are
more active while there are still blank spaces. The question is "Will
they surpass the quality of the Netherlands any time soon ?". If the
answer is "No", then Richard is wrong. Then the AND import deserves at
least one star.