[Imports] "readonly" tag for imported data (ask "simple" editors to not modify)?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Michael Leibowitz wrote:
> There appears to be a higher bar here than for edits in general.  

Yes, definitely. You can map any crappy road you've traveled along and 
where GPS reception was bad, but if you were to import the same data you 
(or at least, the data) would be thrown out in shame, and rightly so!

> Why not programmatically do 
> the merge?  Why must it be manual?

Let's put it this way. If you spend a month doing this manually for the 
whole country, then it's not better. But by preferring manual operation, 
we at the same time usually prefer local operation - a local mapper is 
likely to pick up his "parcel" of data and manually work on that. That 
mapper will then have a sense of ownership (maybe, thinking of the 
recent license change discussion, a concept like "parenthood" would be 
more appropriate) towards the data, and the mapper is more likely to 
care for the data in the future than some hacker from another continent 
who thought he had a cool script.

> I'm just arguing against the constant maligning of imports.  I want to 
> do an import in the future, but I also want to be good citizen and be 
> familiar with the approaches and results.  What I'm observing more often 
> than not is a general perception that imports shouldn't be part of OSM.

Yes, because imports generally give us data without a soul, whereas a 
mapper gives us data with a soul.

Bye
Frederik

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