[Imports] The place where imports are required to post reviews has changed.- or an april fool ?

[James Crawford]

Good morning all.


On 7/7/23 01:48, Marc_marc wrote:
> you put out a call for comments here
> and the next thread says that people on the forum voted,
> without a call for a vote on the mailing list.
> of course ppl from the forum vote for the forum.
> I have run an unanoncement vote with myself and got 100%
> in favor of the mailing :) so what ? april fool ?
Well, the whole point of the vote was to gauge community interest in the 
change, and it seems to me that support is overwhelming.
> Unfortunately, experience with talk-fr and tagging has shown
> the damage this kind of choice can do:
> some people don't migrate, so the community becomes poorer
> and more fragmented, and those on one media can't communicate
> with those on the other media.
The whole point was to change it in the import guidelines, so the 
mailing list is no longer mentioned and the community forum is the 
channel for communication going forward. If new importers only see 
community forum on the wiki page, I don't know how they'd get confused.
> Instead of a proposal "against the list", we need to integrate
> the 2 media into a single discussion forum, which is what Discourse
> will allow when it matures, we just need to give it time to overcome
> its teething problems.
Discourse already has functionality to have a full email experience. It 
just needs to be fully implemented 
<https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/imports-community-category/97957/21>, 
i believe.
> what's even more worrying is the fact that there's hardly a single 
> person among those who have taken the time to review import requests 
> over the last 12 months. you can tell them they have to do it on the 
> forum from now on, but that's not how it works. if a volunteer doesn't 
> want to use an interface that they find unsuitable, they won't do it. 
> and the unreviewed import will be approved, without the quality 
> improvement that the review provided.

It seems there are two problems here,

  * There are too few people reviewing imports
  * Migrating from the list will cause them to leave

I can't say I disagree that there are too few people reviewing imports, 
but I don't believe that the loss from migrating to the community forum 
would come even close to the gain in eyes on the import that you would 
get from the migration.

It's not like new reviewers show up on the list all the time. I have yet 
to see a new user start to regularly respond to other threads on the 
list. The community forum already gets more engagement than the list now 
<https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/imports-community-category/97957/6>, 
and it wasn't even mentioned on the import guidelines before.

> if a volunteer doesn't want to use an interface that they find 
> unsuitable, they won't do it.

I think this speaks much bigger to the mailing list than it does to the 
community forum. The forum is objectively more functional, and much 
easier to query, etc. There was no requirement to vote on this issue, It 
was a matter of courtesy to gauge the opinion of the community. I 
could've used the rationale that the first letter I posted to the list 
received zero opposition, but I doubt that would've made you happy.


--James Crawford
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