[Talk-us] Senseless Germans, again.

Ian Dees ian.dees at gmail.com
Wed Jul 25 15:32:17 UTC 2018


Kevin, It's kind of odd that you request that both Bryan and Frederik tone
down the rhetoric and then generalize and repeat the rhetoric throughout
your message.

American mappers strive for the same goal as almost every other
OpenStreetMapper: to improve the map to the best of their ability. I think
what Bryan is reacting to is the consistent negative and deconstructive
comments that seem to show up on OpenStreetMap community channels (mailing
lists, forums, Reddit, IRC, weeklyOSM, etc.) about OSM data in the US.

As you say, the reaction to finding lower-quality data in OSM shouldn't be
to fire off a message threatening a wholesale revert, it should be to help
the mappers improve their mapping skills and to contribute your
improvements so they can learn. Instead of spending the time to build a
meme about how terrible TIGER data is in some areas and posting it to
Reddit then posting a tasking manager task to improve a portion of it, just
skip to creating the tasking manager task and invite folks to improve it.

Hearing that Americans "inhabit a culture of ad-hoc expedience and
sloppiness" or getting an email from a member of the Data Working Group
threatening to revert your contributions is not particularly inspiring.
It's no wonder it's so hard to build a community in the US. Our own
community is working against us!

Let's not tone down the rhetoric: OSM is a great project and we should be
excited about it. Let's just stop pushing away mappers who are trying to
help.

On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 9:53 AM Kevin Kenny <kevin.b.kenny at gmail.com> wrote:

> Please, let's tone down the rhetoric here - both of you!
>
> Frederik has a long and distinguished history with OSM. He cares about
> the map passionately. He wants very much to see things done right.
> Alas, that tends to mean that he forgets at times what it means to be
> a novice, and expects perfection in mapping from the beginning. He
> works in a part of the world that has a vibrant map community, with
> experienced locals almost everywhere to guide the way, which means
> that he actually gets near-perfection from the novices - because there
> is a generous supply of experienced mentors. For that reason, the
> Europeans, and the Germans in particular, seem to have trouble
> grasping the specific problems that we Americans face - land that is
> incomprehensibly vast to many from Europe, and far too few mappers to
> cover it.
>
> On the other hand, we Americans inhabit a culture of ad-hoc expedients
> and sloppiness - and pay for it in the map, with broken routing,
> broken rendering, and so on. We get in data that are 'just barely good
> enough' - and tend to abandon them to degrade into 'not even good
> enough' as the next urgent project beckons, of places where there are
> no usable data at all. Or go off to our other communities - after all,
> we all have lives beyond the map. (I understand that mapping is also
> what Frederik does for a living. I don't.) This leaves our map in
> disarray, and it's easy for someone to want to throw up his hands and
> rip out big stretches of it.
>
> I'm sure that I'm guilty both ways. I've no doubt field-mapped stuff
> very badly when I was learning, and I've no doubt missed going back to
> fix things. (I at least hope that I've left matters better than I've
> found them!) I've also been guilty, most likely, of damaging the
> community - by importing. I still do it - but in my defense, all of my
> imports are nearly poster children for "data not feasible for amateur
> mappers to survey in the field." (Frederik has argued stongly to me
> that this is a synonym for "data that mappers care too little about to
> deserve inclusion in OSM." I remain unconvinced.)
>
> I do try to tidy up after myself when people leave notes or changelog
> comments! I don't believe that I've ever had a change, no matter how
> large, reverted wholesale.
>
> I do see that some of the Austin sidewalk data appear to be of pretty
> questionable quality. I don't know to what extent the project has
> mapped elsewhere, or how far the problem extends. Has anyone tried to
> reach out to the mappers in question? Or - presuming that this was a
> student group - tried to find their faculty advisor?  Does the web
> site give contact information for a project leader? Are members of the
> DWG other than Frederik aware of the issue?
>
> Reverting the changes should surely be the last resort, not the first,
> and glibly tossing off, "at least they've labeled everything with the
> project, so we can delete it when they fail," is no way to recruit
> mappers! (Recruiting mappers should probably be American mappers'
> highest priority - we have so few!) On the occasions where the mappers
> and leadership are unreachable, it always should have the tone,
> "unfortunately, the original mapper in not answering communications,
> and there is a lack of resources to field-map the questionable
> features, so reversion seems to be unavoidable." The glib dismissal is
> particularly unseemly when it can be misinterpreted as an official
> pronouncement of the DWG, of which Frederik is a member.
>
> Compounding the problem by nationalistic labelling of this as "yet
> another German attempt to bully US mappers" serves nobody. Yes, I know
> that Americans and Germans do engage in Kulturkampf over OSM
> management. I'm frustrated by both the US "we'll fix it later"
> attitude, by some statements from the other side of the Atlantic that
> seem to say, "our model is fine; if you have cases that don't fit, fix
> your country!" But always keep examining cultural assumptions. We come
> from places that have different needs. Sometimes we Americans are
> horribly slipshod simply because we can't manage better. Sometimes the
> Europeans are horribly meticulous because they are trying to address
> problems that are entirely beyond what we Americans can dream of
> reaching. (Wheelchair routing? I'm still trying to get rural roads to
> within a few hundred metres of their actual locations, and get
> government and community facilities on the map in the first place. You
> have to crawl before you can run.)
>
> Let's get the data - and more important, the process - fixed, rather
> than falling to fighting among ourselves. Fix the immediate problem.
> Educate the mappers. Keep exhorting Americans to improve their mapping
> standard. Keep cautioning Europeans not to expect too much - we have a
> big country and too few people to map it. And keep trying to map the
> world!
>
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