[Imports] United States Poultry Import

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

Am Do., 21. Apr. 2022 um 10:37 Uhr schrieb Hiausirg <grussausbw at gmx.de>:

> ...while your project definition is true, imports are an important part
> too. Without them, the US map (or the database) would look totally
> different - and by different, I mean empty.
>


this is an open question, we can't say for sure what would have happened
"if", but the slow growth of the US community in the early years was
attributed by some people to the debt created with the TIGER roads import,
which basically left such a mess that it (eventually) made many people stay
away. Generally, an active community of people is much more important than
the data, because if nobody maintains the data it becomes stale and
therefore unreliable and consequently useless. On the other hand, with a
sufficient number of people on the ground we can recreate any data in short
time. People tend to feel more responsible for data they have entered
themselves, with respect to data they have taken from someone else. They
feel that they "own" the data and feel compelled to care for it.

It is also generally much better to have fewer and reliable data (i.e.
things missing) than wrong data, because wrong data is much harder to
detect than missing data. Missing data is often apparent, you see that the
data is not complete, and can draw your clues (and can at least rely on
what _is_ there), while you will not see if the data is simply wrong, you
will probably run into problems with wrong data, and if it is too much of
it, you will likely turn away. On the other hand, for many applications
incomplete data is still useful.

Cheers,
Martin
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