[talk-au] Tracing items.
Andrew Loughhead
andrew at incanberra.com.au
Fri Jun 6 14:34:12 BST 2008
info at 4x4falcon.com wrote:
>> And if someone enjoys tracing roads or some other feature exclusively
>> are we to tell them to go away because it's not our idea of the best
>> way to spend their time on OSM?
>>
>
> Missed the point of my suggestion totally didn't you. I am not saying
> don't do it just that if you want to improve the whole map in osm then
> here are some things that will help to do that.
>
Good grief. Can we please all calm down? Really there is no need for
such aggressive emails here.
OSM is somewhat like a wiki. In a wiki people will contribute in
different ways, basically scratching their own itch.
I did most of the inner north Canberra suburbs with GPS. When the yahoo
imagery became available I was able to compare the two. Yahoo was fine
enough for positional accuracy, certainly within the error margin of an
average consumer GPS in stream mode.
We had a baby. At that point my ability to find time to ride or drive
around getting GPS traces vanished. But I felt I could still contribute,
using Yahoo imagery.
I traced quite a bit of inner Canberra from Yahoo. I am confident that
the georeference of the imagery around here is fine, and I am familiar
enough with the areas traced that I doubt I made any more errors than
gps mapping would make. I am also confident that my tracing has
produced better *shape* in the roads than most mapping in OSM, some of
which looks a bit like join-the-dots.
And thats the thing. I liked tracing, and I liked getting the circles
and curves of older Canberra to be just right. Yahoo was a great way to
do it, and I think arguably much better than GPS, for shape. Yahoo
imagery is a little out of date sometimes, where roads have been
realigned, but I live here, and drive through these areas, and I doubt I
have traced any errors. Overall, I got to scratch my itch.
Then I found some of my local co-mappers writing negative emails and
diary entries, somewhat like the opening of this thread, containing
similar statements about Yahoo, and others frankly I don't understand,
to the effect that "it all has to be re-done anyway". I *think* that
was because those areas needed to be visited again to get names and
other features. The time consuming phase of doing really nice shape
didn't need to be done again, but that wasn't *their* itch, so they I
guess they didn't value that. Their itch was having many names and many
features.
So while I think I understand and value the contributions of my local
fellow mappers, who have done a fantastic job of collecting other parts
of Canberra, and of filling in many more feature types and names than I
would ever have been bothered to do, I don't feel like my own
contribution was valued. My enthusiasm dried up and I don't invest time
in OSM now.
I think Darrin made a perfectly fair point: "Let those who want to
contribute in their own way do it." Unless people do things that are
substantively damaging to OSM, then whatever they want to contribute
should be valued. Otherwise contributors are just driven away by those
who think they understand everything and that their view is the only
valid one.
I think that not understanding that someone elses motivation or itch, is
different from your own, is missing the point.
cheers
Andrew.
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