[Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot

Ed Avis eda at waniasset.com
Fri Jun 10 12:54:59 BST 2011


Richard Fairhurst <richard at ...> writes:

>Worcester is nominally "complete"; yet despite the assurances of
>people in this thread that "completeness will bring more mappers",
>Worcester has just one mapper, Steve, who was active anyway before
>OSSV came along.

I would not claim that completing one particular town will have a
significant effect on the number of OSM users and hence the number of
contributors.  It is positive, but what really matters is improving
the 'worst-case performance' of OSM nationally.  If you pick some
metric such as ITO's OS Locator comparison (for want of a better
metric), then I contend that what matters for OSM adoption is not the
places at the top of the list but the one at the very bottom.  If we
can improve the worst place in the country from 35% completion to 90%,
OSM use will greatly increase and so will the pool of contributors.

I appreciate that this is not directly testable except by doing it.
As SteveC noted, most claims about imports require a parallel universe
to check.

When the area near my house in East London became complete (from
survey and Yahoo; this was before the days of OS) then the number of
local mappers *decreased*.  Of course, because the area was pretty
much done, I concentrated my mapping trips on places further afield.
If having an area complete means that a contributor can spend his or
her time on other parts of the map which also need attention, that
must be a good thing.

--
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>




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