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

[Christoph Hormann]

On Wednesday 24 April 2019, Jarek Piórkowski wrote:
>
> I like imports, but for quite another reason:
>
> As an OpenStreetMap editor, a resident of a largely empty country,
> and a human, I am interested in imports as otherwise the map of where
> I live will remain full of blank spots for decades. I want to see a
> map in the default OpenStreetMap.org layer, not a blank.

I am aware that there are a lot of perfectly valid reasons why people 
want OSM to be a project focusing on collecting useful geodata and less 
on cooperatively assembling local knowledge of human mappers.

The problem is that these two visions of OSM are mutually exclusive.  If 
you want OSM to focus on cooperatively assembling local knowledge you 
have to accept that the only way you are going to fill blank spots in 
the map is by motivating people to acquire local knowledge of these 
areas and sharing it in OSM and that imports can only work in a support 
role for craft mapping and not to fill in blank spots.

> I understand this is not a large motivator for humans in countries
> that do not have thousands of square kilometers of wilderness per
> possible mapper, let alone active mapper. But some understanding of
> our position would be appreciated.

This is an idea (or rather an accusation of course) that i have heard 
occasionally in the past - interestingly almost exclusively from people 
from Canada.  

The irony of this is that you are telling this to someone who has done 
90 percent of his mapping work in areas far more remote and wild than 
any place you have most likely considered to do an import in.  So 
frankly i have very little understanding for your special position 
here.  Have you considered that one of the reasons why the active 
mapping community in Canada is so small is that you are discouraging 
potential craft mappers (in particular also ones from abroad) with the 
imports?

Anyway - lets not loose track of the subject here.  I made kind of a 
fundamental statement here in response to Peda's suggestion for 
adjusting the rules for imports but i don't think this should 
overshadow the specific discussion of the import in Sweden.

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