[Talk-GB] Importing Shell fuel stations

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 03.11.2017 11:59, Ilya Zverev wrote:
> I see many imports every day going unnoticed, and I see this kind of a harsh reaction on proposed imports. It is easy to see why people are reluctant to announce their imports and automated edits beforehand. 

Any import that goes unnoticed for now, and is noticed a year or two or
three later, is liable to be removed entirely without further discussion
at any time, by anyone.

An import that has been discussed beforehand and agreed to be a good
thing doesn't run this risk.

I think this is incentive enough for people to use the proper channels,
and I'm more than happy to revert a few 5-year-old imports just to prove
the point.

> Until we develop a polite, predictable and mature way of clearing imports, we will continue seeing undiscussed imports and being angry at people who just did not want to be yelled at.

I think it is a frequent error to mistake criticism of data or process
for insults or "being yelled at", and it is good on the whole to see
that the OSM community is protective of its data.

The imports process is not there to rubber-stamp anything that is
brought up, but to ensure it is of high enough quality. Simply saying
yes to anything is not "mature".

It may be true that existing high requirements are partly responsible
for bad imports being attempted, but I do not concur that this means we
should lower our standards so more imports can pass. To me, this is like
saying "let's get rid of speed limits, then nobody will be speeding any
more". It is true but not desirable.

Would-be importers can hope for help from the OSM community but they are
not entitled to it; the likelihood of such help forthcoming is probably
dependent on how interesting the data set is for the community.

On 03.11.2017 13:29, Brian Prangle wrote:
> I welcome this initiative from Ilya. We are never going to get a
totally correct data source, and even data originating from human
mappers can leave a lot to be desired.

We generally afford more goodwill to individual mappers than to imports
because even if the first steps of an individual mapper can be
imperfect, they can learn and improve and become a valuable resource
over time. An import, on the other hand, is usually done as a one-off
and we can either take it or leave it; there's rarely a situation where
we would say "ah, the importer will probably spend more time to fix that
in the future".

Specifically, some people have pointed out areas in which this
particular import would deteriorate existing data (replace landline with
mobile phone etc.); this is something not even a newbie mapper would get
away with. ("Saw this on the corporate web site and added it"...)

> When we imported Naptan data we added a review tag set to "no", so
that as the community verified the data it could be set to "yes" or just
deleted.

This can be a working strategy but it should always go hand-in-hand with
a plan on how to get the review done in a reasonable time. The 12
million "tiger:reviewed-no" in the US seem to have no intent of dying
out ;-)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"