[Talk-us] Open survey on participation biases in OSM

[Mark Wagner]

On Tue, 5 Sep 2017 08:25:33 +0200
Marc Gemis <marc.gemis at gmail.com> wrote:

> One of the discussion points on her diary entry was female hygiene
> products found in women's toilets. How is a man going to map that,
> without access to women's toilets ?
> 
> The real question for me is are men more likely going to map shop=car
> than shop=clothes;clothes=underwear/fashion/ ... (sorry for the
> stereotyping)
> will men map leisure=playground or amenity=pub ?
> will a roman catholic map a mosque ?
> will a non-dog owner map leisure=dog_park ?
> 
> in short: will we map everything we  see or do we map only our
> interests ? Furthermore, do we really see everything or do we only see
> (and map) things we are conditioned to ?
> 
> This is not about buildings, addresses, roads and paths. They are
> pretty gender neutral I think. It's about POIs.

I know I map what I see (or more precisely, what my camera captures).
If it doesn't have a sign out front, I don't map it.

To take an example from the midwives vs. strip clubs debate, the phone
book lists seven midwives and/or midwife groups in the Spokane area.  Of
those, three are attached to hospitals and one to a community-health
clinic, and so wouldn't have signs.  Two are operating out of private
homes and don't have signs (and I wouldn't map them if they did, just
like I don't map lawn care or computer repair businesses operating out
of private homes).  The last one is in the 95% of the city I haven't yet
photo-mapped.

The phone book lists zero strip clubs in the Spokane area.  Despite
that, I've found and mapped one strip club: it was on a major street
and had a clear sign out front.

Yes, there's a bias in my mapping, but it's a bias towards "things
identifiable from the street".  I'm more likely to map a car store than
a clothes store, because car stores are generally not found inside
shopping malls. Playgrounds beat pubs, because every playground is
visible from the street.  And this non-dog-owner didn't map the dog
park, because it was already mapped by the time I got started.

-- 
Mark