[Imports] Help request on Guatemala municipal boundaries

[Christoph Hormann]

On Tuesday 20 June 2017, CARLOS A. DUARTE wrote:
> >
> > Then, I compared the existing information in OSM with the official
> > municipal boundaries shapefile from Guatemala (from National
> > Geographic Service) and I found that most of the existing polygons
> > are different to the official polygons, so I am exploring the idea
> > of replacing all the polygons with the official shapefile.

A general reminder here:

If boundary data comes from official sources that does not imply the 
data precisely documents the boundary as surveyed/defined.  On the 
contrary the vast majority (in my experience 80-90 percent) of 
administrative boundary data sets published by official institutions 
are either simplified to some degree or represent 
approximations/estimations of some kind.

This means you should never replace existing boundary data just because 
it is different from officially published data based on the overall 
assumptions that this has to be more accurate because it is official in 
some way.  We have tons of examples in the OSM database where imported 
official data is blatantly inaccurate.

I have not looked at the Guatemala boundaries though so i have no idea 
if the data you plan to import is an improvement or not, this should be 
checked based on local knowledge.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/