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

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 15:03 2023-07-07, Mike Thompson đã viết:
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jul 7, 2023 at 12:43 PM Minh Nguyen 
> <minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us 
> <mailto:minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us>> wrote:
> 
> 
>     Likewise, I don't buy the argument that a typical import proposer would
>     give up because of the mailing list workflow. They're more likely to
>     get
>     discouraged by the responses they get here, or the lack thereof. :-)
> 
> It seems that the people that participate in the imports mailing list 
> are very particular when it comes to imports and automated edits, and 
> while I generally agree with that, I can see where some might have 
> different views.  To highlight the differences I have stated the extreems:
> * "It is better to have an empty map rather than introduce all but the 
> smallest fraction of erroneous data through an import or automated edit" 
> vs "the lack of data itself is an error, and therefore as long as at 
> least 51% of the imported data is accurate the map is better off with 
> the import."
> * "If the data to be imported is unlikely to be maintained by the 
> community, then it is better that the import not take place." vs "at 
> least we will have valid data until it goes stale, and we will worry 
> about that then."
> * "If one is going to go to the trouble of doing an import, one might as 
> well capture all of the relevant information from the imported data into 
> the appropriate tags." vs "capture the most important information in 
> tags, worry about the other information later"
> * "The data must have an appropriate license, or a statement that the 
> data can be imported into OSM with our ODbL license from someone who has 
> the authority to make such a statement." vs "someone at the government 
> office responded to my email and said that the data is 'available to the 
> public' or such and such government agency that owns the data has an 
> open records policy"

If this post was in response to mine, then these are four paragraphs of 
words in my mouth that I would never say, but maybe you're paraphrasing 
shade that others have thrown at this mailing list? As to the last 
point, I just refer U.S.-based mappers to this guidance from the LWG 
[1], because it's often their first experience writing to a government 
agency, so it's easy to get a false negative through tone-deafness.

> I can't help but think one of the real reasons for moving the discussion 
> of imports to the forum is that people don't like the answers they get 
> on the mailing list.  While we can have different views, the approach 
> should be to openly debate those views on the official channels, not do 
> an end run and change the venue where one might get a more receptive 
> response.

I agree that forum shopping (no pun intended) is not good for the 
project, but a low approval rate is not the driver behind this change. I 
didn't say the forum is better because there will be unbridled 
enthusiasm for imports. After all, people find discouragement in good 
news delivered poorly and encouragement in bad news delivered well.

> The fact that apparently more people are subscribed to the imports part 
> of the forum vs the imports mailing list is really disturbing.  If 
> someone cares about this community and imports, shouldn't they subscribe 
> to the official communication channel about imports, even if they also 
> subscribe to one or more unofficial channels as well?  The fact that 
> they don't, indicates to me that they don't care about the community, or 
> have been misled to believe that the imports mailing list isn't the 
> official channel, or that perhaps there is no official channel, and as 
> long as an import is discussed somewhere then it is ok.

This comes across like a "the way we've always done things" argument, 
but OSM's processes don't exist for their own sake. Before you accuse a 
significant part of the community of bad faith, skim through some of the 
#import discussions. [2] You'd probably find not a lot of daylight 
between the median viewpoint here and the median viewpoint there.

If anything, the broader OSM community, including more casual mappers, 
also needs to get in the habit of saying no to import and automated edit 
proposals that adversely affect them. In the process, they may discover 
alternative options for improving the map that keep the proposer engaged 
with the local community. Going off-topic for this list, in other words.

[1] 
<https://2019.stateofthemap.us/program/sat/odbl-license-compatibility.html> 
<https://youtu.be/VUcokUcDKic?t=1457>
[2] https://community.openstreetmap.org/tag/import

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us