[Imports] Making the current guidelines/code of conduct about imports/automated|mechanical edits clearer and merged

Clifford Snow clifford at snowandsnow.us
Tue Dec 18 23:43:12 UTC 2012


On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 9:04 AM, sly (sylvain letuffe) <liste at letuffe.org>wrote:

> I'd like to present you with an early, not finished, alpha draft about an
> edit
> policy :
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Draft/Edit_Policy
>
> The page says all, but I'm happy to start that discussion here.
>

Two thoughts --

The draft states that manual edits are  less potentially problematic.
Manual edits, with the exception of malicious, are prone to human error. We
transpose digits, introduce spelling errors, forget to connect nodes, and
even position nodes in the wrong location. Then there is the error of
omission. It takes too much effort to add in all the data, for example, we
add a coffee shop, but don't add an address or add a street, but abbreviate
parts of the street name.

Lets instead look at what we should be importing. And what shouldn't. For
example, the bulk of the coastlines should be imported. Mainly because it
is unlikely that we would collect data on all the coastlines. Lets focusing
on what data is better imported and what is better to be done manually.
Certainly there will be some gray that should be discussed.

Secondly, the need to use a new user id for imports. Looking back in
history on the imports mailing list, it seemed at one time that the
requirement for a unique user id for imports was just for mechanical bots
and scripted imports. I can understand the thinking. But somewhere along
the way, that requirement seemed to be for all types of imports. Rather
than ~100 objects, I would recommend separating mechanical bots and
scripted imports from manually cutting and pasting. It was the ~100 objects
that first caught my eye. What is an object. A node or a way. I might
import a stream. it could easily have more than 100 nodes yet be fairly
trivial to import. But 100 streams is a lot of objects to be manually
importing at a single shot.

Thanks for a draft to get us started.

-- 
Clifford

OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
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