[Osmf-talk] Paid Mapping / WikiPR like issues in OSM?

[Michael Kugelmann]

on 27.11.2013 15:54, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> You might say: as long as what they add is correct, why bother?
[...]
> I'm not offering any answers - just questions right now.
At the moment I don't mind whether someone gets paid for editing or not 
AS LONG AS they respect ground truth.

One "worst case" somehow I can cogitate is the following example:
* Supermarket-A hires a payd company PC to map all of their supermarkets
* PC also gets the order to map _some_ other supermarkets of various 
brands (but not all, prefered if they would be far away from A's locations)
* PC also has the order not at all to map supermarkets from brand B
=> company A could think on this about getting more customers as their 
äocation can be found easyer.
If we as a community would look at these edits we would say: "wow, 
somebody is interested in our POIs, especially supermarkets". BAsically 
we already have compareable things with existing real mappers with 
specially interested in railways and elecrical power supply. And I think 
first it would be difficult to notice that brand B is not mapped at all.
Anyhow these edits could be regarded as a lack of neutrality - but they 
still are "ground truth"...
And: what about a normal non payd mapper who - just for some personal 
reason - does not like brand B and only maps brand A?

As you also mentioned: the community is our most valueable asset - and 
we should always keep this up.
But at the moment I don't see a problem with payd edits.

Maybe we could put some words about "ground truth" or so into some 
"documents" (e.g. community guidelines), maybe this would help is in the 
example above PC would delete existing supermarkets from B or so.



Best regards,
Michael.