[Imports] Value of imports in general (was: Import of addresses in Poland)

[Pieren]

On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 8:47 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> OSM is about community first, and about data second. (This is trivial
> and not up for discussion - if we lose the data but still have people we
> can re-create the data, but if we lose the people then we're done. If
> anyone is of the opinion that data is more important than people, don't
> read on - we live in different universes.)

Yep, that's where imports vs anti-imports camps are fundamentaly
disagreeing. For me, OSM is obviously about free geodata first. And
building a community is just one means among others to reach this
primary goal. Imports is another one. If imported data is lost,
someone can re-import. If a new version of the dataset is released,
someone else can update it in OSM (carefully). I see imported datasets
really like a group of external contributors and the importer as a
gateway between two communities.
But you are right on one point : bad imports can create more damages
than bad individual contributors. In this way, I agree that imports
need some additional control.

Pieren