[OSM-talk] OSM the mediocre alternative (was: don't like you etc.)

[Jeroen Dekkers]

At Sat, 21 Apr 2007 07:49:02 +0100,
Tom Chance wrote:
> 
> On Saturday 21 April 2007 04:59:41 Frederik Ramm wrote:
> > Today, quality standards are much higher, as a lot of terrain is covered
> > by Wikipedia articles and things get more refined. There are still
> > niches of course, where the subject is such specialist matter that the
> > user base shrinks dramatically, but overall it has reached a level where
> > many, many people would be hard-pressed to find any topic they could
> > write on or an article they could improve!
> >
> > We, too, will soon reach a situation where most of the ground is covered
> > and "worker ant" mappers will be out of business. Karlsruhe, where I
> > live, is almost complete; a few finishing touches, a few footways here
> > and there, and maybe we'll make an effort to exhaustively map all public
> > telephones, pharmacies, letter boxes, and restaurants, and if we think
> > that's not enough we can do speed limits or spend endless hours on
> > minuscle details of a few complicated junctions to make them "look
> > right"... but it gets more fine-grained all the time, and the times
> > where any Newbie could grab is GPS and get mapping in Karlsruhe are
> > over. You will soon need specialist knowledge to improve mapping here.
> 
> There are two big differences that I think we should bear in mind.
> 
> 
> 1. With Wikipedia there are tools to make it easy for people to see what is 
> changing, and when something does make a change it's not all that difficult 
> for somebody to spot a fraud or mistake. With OpenStreeMap we don't really 
> have tools that are good enough yet - the RSS feeds are very, very 
> primitive - and even if somebody did add something I'm not going to know if 
> it's correct. I'm certainly not going to go on several long bike rides each 
> weekend to see if a pharmacy is indeed called "I.P. Freely" and a road is 
> called "Roger Way". In this sense we're even more mediocre than Wikipedia at 
> the moment and that may remain the case, especially as people (quite rightly) 
> create more usable tools.

Wikipedia had to create their mediawiki software too. Wiki's are so
normal now that you can't even think about a web without them, but
when wikipedia started this wasn't the case. In the same sense we've
to develop our own software and compared to wikipedia, I think we've
got a more complex problem. I don't think that it's very hard to do,
but it will cost a lot of time to write. And I think that's a problem
at the moment, we need more developers with time to write that
software.

> These make me think that at some point the current OSM database is going to 
> need to be locked down, probably by area given the disparity of coverage, 
> with only trusted people allowed to make changes to the core data, just to 
> protect it from many malicious changes.

I don't believe in locking things down. What we need are, as you
already write, good tools to monitor changes. Once an area is complete
there shouldn't be a lot of changes in the street anymore. We're also
modelling the world here, so I don't think we're going to have much
"edit wars" about how streets are named for example. So from that
perspective I think things are easier, but getting the technology
right is more difficult for us.

Jeroen Dekkers