[Imports] Fwd: Importing West Virginia State Forests Boundary

[stevea]

This from someone who has struggled with (for at least 12 years) and perhaps enjoyed some success with many quite difficult topics related to a complex, county-wide landuse import [1] that I did not initiate (which remains in OSM after nine, ten additional data updates / iterations and seems to be responsible for winning an OSM Gold Star award from bestofosm.org with the comment "nearly perfect landuse"):  the sort of landuse import you propose / do CAN be done, and done well.  Moreover, it can be done with seemingly-conflicting (but not, actually) landCOVER (multi)polygons simultaneously with landUSE (multi)polygons.  Both are not required (one or the other are "good additions to the map"), but both can co-exist if "done well."

Yes, all of that is a mouthful, but in my county, it has been a work-in-progress for over a decade.  And yes, I know that some people dislike the results, but there isn't anything wrong or "non-OSM" about these data.  Finally, they continue to get better, as the "teasing apart" of any "double-tagged" (both landuse and landcover on the same polygon) is well underway and DOES improve the data over time.

There are an infinity of both correct and incorrect methods to import or curate data into OSM.  Please, continue to both dialog with the community in a forum such as this, as well as looking at data examples which are actually in our map.  There is more than one way to get reasonable, smartly imported data into OSM, and especially with imports, it includes community consensus that what you are doing and how you are doing it is "correct" in some sense.  Yes, it might be "only somewhat correct" as of the day of import (for example, the infamous TIGER import in the USA), with some correction required as both tastes and tagging standards / expectations / semantic flavors evolve over time (and they DO).  But please strive to make any import as "correct as possible given what we know and have standardized today" and you should be in good shape to receive the sort of community peer-review that it takes to generate consensus.

There are not always easy, clear answers here, as the complexities of the data often yield many subtle decision forks being required on a path towards community acceptance.

SteveA

[1] https://wiki.osm.org/Santa_Cruz_County,_California#Landuse