[Talk-us] Los Angeles area status

[Alan Mintz]

Just to put a picture to the words, for those not necessarily familiar with 
what we're talking about re: the Los Angeles re-map, here's a pic from OSM 
Inspector of most of Los Angeles, Orange, and western San Bernardino 
counties as of 2012-06-14 20:10 UTC: 
http://sites.google.com/site/am909geo/osm-1/LI.LA.20120614T2010Z.jpg

Here's the link to the area in OSMI:
http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=wtfe&lon=-118.12315&lat=33.97277&zoom=10&overlays=overview,wtfe_point_harmless,wtfe_line_harmless,wtfe_point_inrelation,wtfe_line_inrelation_cp,wtfe_line_inrelation,wtfe_point_modified,wtfe_line_modified_cp,wtfe_line_modified,wtfe_point_created,wtfe_line_created_cp,wtfe_line_created

The clean parts on the right are San Bernardino County. The clean parts at 
the upper left are West LA and some of the San Fernando Valley. At the 
lower left, parts of the south bay and south LA are clean.

The dense red parts are eastern San Fernando Valley, much of the San 
Gabriel Valley, mid-south Orange County.

Despite the work of hundreds of mappers over the last few years, and the 
tireless work of several dedicated re-mappers, the map will look very 
different in much of this 4,250 square mile (11,000 sq km) area - among the 
top 20 economies of the world - if the redaction bot is run here.

Much of the unclean data is because of a single declining user - "blars", 
who does _not_ actually disagree with the ODBL license. His only problem 
was the open-ended clause in the CT that allows a future change in license 
without approval of the individual contributors (only a super-majority I 
think). I'm not sure I blame him, in theory, for not agreeing to something 
unseen, being solely at the mercy of the masses - the same ones that 
approved this change to begin with.

The problem is not limited to LA, either. Other areas that light up at zoom 
4 include much of Japan (especially the area around Tokyo and the south), 
Australia (Sydney, Adelaide, Perth), Dominican Republic, most of Poland and 
Kosovo, Moscow and St. Petersburg (Russia), parts of eastern and northern 
Germany, Thessaloniki and other areas of Greece, even London. Some other 
areas of the US are the SF Bay area in CA, Salt Lake City, Austin (TX), 
Columbia (SC),

I'd like a clear answer from the "powers that be" about why they feel it is 
OK to move forward, given all the damage that will be done.

--
Alan Mintz <Alan_Mintz+OSM at Earthlink.net>