[Imports] Import of forests, farmland and other types of land cover for Sweden generated from Naturvårdsverkets Nationella Marktäckedata 2018

[Christoph Hormann]

On Tuesday 23 April 2019, Peter Barth wrote:
> [...]
>
> From this quite small random sample I'd argue that this is a very low
> quality import. I'm not really astonished about that, but I'm
> questioning if it isn't time to increase our quality standards wrt
> imports and introduce import permissions as opposed to just ignore
> criticism and wait a week or two to import.

It is my impression that the problem here runs much deeper.  It gets 
down to a fundamental dissent about what OSM is in essence - whether it 
is a project for humans to cooperatively assemble their own local 
knowledge or if it is a project with the primary goal to collect 
subjectively useful geodata under a uniform license and in a uniform 
format for the convenience of data users.

The latter is quite clearly a minority opinion among active mappers but 
it is not a small one and it is a voiceful one (and also supported by 
quite a bit of money of course).

People planning imports are very often approaching OSM with such views 
of a primacy of usefulness.  This is the main reason why i mostly 
stopped reviewing imports here in substance.  Because my critique and 
review work is aimed at making sure the import benefit and encourage 
human mappers in their work.  In most cases people planning imports 
however have other goals that have higher priority for them (most 
often 'getting the data they have into OSM' for the benefit of data 
users) which makes attempts at working towards other goals fairly 
pointless and frustrating.

I had a quick look at the areas you pointed to and concur that apart 
from the principal critique of the suitability of the data as a source 
for information in OSM the data preparation also seems of poor quality.  
Partly this is stuff that could be fixed by better data processing (at 
least in theory - this is not stuff you do with a few mouse clicks in 
some standard software).  Partly this is also due to using a data 
source not meant for cartographic applications in the first place.

In terms of concrete rules for imports to ensure certain standards of 
quality - designing clearer and more effective principles would 
certainly be possible, for example we could add the requirements that 
any import needs to be co-sponsored by at least three local mappers 
with on-the-ground mapping experience in the area of the import and who 
share responsibility for the quality of the import.

But i am not sure if this would be of much benefit.  Rules in OSM work 
when they represent consensus and serve to enforce this consensus 
against a few outliers.  But as mentioned above we don't actually have 
a consensus on this matter so this would be more along the lines of 
enforcing a value system against a significant minority who disagree 
with those values.  While i would want this to be possible (defending 
our core values against significant opposition) i am not sure this is 
still the case.  As mentioned i am pretty sure that a majority of 
active mappers in OSM still supports the primacy of local knowledge and 
OSM being primarily a project of local mappers to cooperatively 
assemble their local knowledge but only a relatively small fraction of 
these are actually willing to defend those principles against other 
interests.  Ultimately it is not the majority which decides where the 
journey goes but who is willing to invest time and fight for their 
interests and values.

Another general side note not specific to imports and not specifically 
aimed at Grigory although i refer to his words here of course - terms 
like "fuzzy", "blurred" and "fractal" have become kind of fashionable 
in OSM to create a certain framing.  My suggestion would be not to use 
them.  Because once you try defining these terms to give them actual 
meaning you will realize that how you use them does not really make 
much sense or that you are using them as synonyms for other terms you 
don't want to use because they don't fit your framing.  In other words:  
Whatever you want to say - you do not support your argument by weaving 
in these words.


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