[Talk-us] Another day, another bad import

Martijn van Exel m at rtijn.org
Mon May 2 07:32:24 BST 2011


On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 9:44 PM, Richard Welty <rwelty at averillpark.net>wrote:

> On 5/1/11 2:35 PM, Toby Murray wrote:
>
>> On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Richard Weait<richard at weait.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 2:23 PM, Alan Millar<grunthos503 at yahoo.com>
>>>  wrote:
>>>
>>>> Yeah...  Every time I go editing in some new place, I always find
>>>> another reason to hate newbies, too.
>>>>
>>> I think that is different in a significant way.  It is much easier to
>>> "fix a newbie" than to fix an import.  And when you do "fix a newbie"
>>> You've not only fixed their mapping to date, but also their mapping in
>>> the future, and even the future mapping of the mappers they meet.
>>>
>> Yes, this message has nothing to do with newbies. If newbies are doing
>> large scale imports then that is just another layer of "DONOTWANT" on
>> top of existing problems with imports. Imports are *HARD* do to right.
>> Any import needs to be done by experienced mappers who have
>> *significant* experience in manual mapping. In my very strongly held
>> opinion.
>>
> and as i've said before, no import should be done without a plan,
> and the plan _must_ include QC procedures and provision for a
> rollback if the QC fails.
>
> a newbie shouldn't be doing imports. an experienced mapper who
> fails to do necessary QC should be taken out back and shot.
>
> richard
>

I've been thinking about this from a perspective that is probably not very
OSM-like: what if we had a system like StackOverflow, where you need to earn
yourself some reputation by doing Good Things before you can do just
anything to the data? This relates to the idea of having a badge system [1],
where badges would be auto-awarded (as opposed to the lolcats of awesomeness
we have currently). More badges -> higher rep -> more rights in the system.
On SO, this is combined with the concept of upvoting / downvoting
contributions, which could be translated to changesets, although I'm not so
sure if that would work well. If at all feasible I'd say you would only be
able to up/downvote changesets covering areas where you made 'significant'
contributions yourself. This has some challenges (like the case of editing
huge relations) but those could feasibly be met.

How would such a system affect the mappers community? I'd say we lose some
proponents of egalitarianism-above-everything, but it could work in our
favor in cases like this one. As an important side effect, it could also
serve to combat the huge churn rate we currently see with new contributors -
70% of OSM accounts never made one single edit, and of those who do, around
65% never edit anything after their first month. I believe giving new
mappers concrete, attainable goals and a sense of accomplishment - badges -
could really help to retain motivation.

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Badges
-- 
Martijn van Exel
http://about.me/mvexel
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