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

[Glen Barnes]

On 21/12/2012, at 3:39 PM, Robert Coup <robert at coup.net.nz> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 11:02 AM, sly (sylvain letuffe) <liste at letuffe.org> wrote:
> Le mercredi 19 décembre 2012 23:16:29, Glen Barnes a écrit :
> > Agreed. If you are doing a 'managed import' of bulk data (rather than an
> > automated import)
> What do you define as "managed" ?
> 
> What Glen is referring to is what we're doing in New Zealand:
> A lot of diverse layers, many small, some large.
> Community tagging/approval process for each layer
> User checkouts of a specific layer + geographical area, limited by number of features
> Automated generation of .osm files for each checkout
> Manual merging with any existing features in JOSM; deciding "best"; merging tags; verifying with imagery; etc. Upload results to OSM.
> Mark checkout as approved, move onto the next one
> So I guess "managed" means "no bots; no automated uploads; software-assisted generation of .osm files, then manual merging process"

Exactly. As I've mentioned previously there is a growing number of datasets that overlap a lot with existing OSM data and people really want to merge this in. Automated imports just can't be done for all the reasons we know about, it requires manual intervention by possibly a large number of people. I get the feeling that this type of import hasn't really been on the radar of OSM until recently and I think it is only coming to fore now as the open data movement is making progress by getting organisations to open their data under permissive licenses. 

> 
> 
> > then you may have 100 volunteers. Do they each need a
> > separate upload account? Should they all share 1 login?
> 
> Both are okay, but they mustn't use their own account for other manual edits.
> (I'm just expressing the de facto rule)
> 
> Seems like 100 people sharing a single account is a recipe for disaster, even moreso than using their own individual (not _import) accounts for importing.
> 

So the rule _is_ to have a separate account(s) for the import currently. I really do think this needs to be reviewed as that just doesn't scale to 10's or 100's of people working on a single import project. Only having one account mens there is no accountability to an individual person and have one for each person just clutters the OSM user database with rubbish accounts. Having individual accounts also sucks in JOSM and it is very easy to forget which account you are uploading with especially if you are switching between uploading and editing work (which is very common in a merge situation as opposed to automated upload).

A lot of this does come back to Paul's earlier discussions around defining the types of imports. In my mind this is a distinct type of import and needs to have some new guidelines/process as we've found out with the discussion of "City of Seattle imports" things can get heated and there is a lack of understanding around this type of data.

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