[OSM-talk] OSM & Political problems (Re: China cracks down on illegal online map services to protect state security)

[Jo]

Bernt M. Johnsen wrote:
> On 27/03/2008, Edoardo Marascalchi <edoardo at edoardomarascalchi.it> wrote:
>   
>> http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-03/25/content_7858467.htm
>> [...]
>>     The campaign would also target websites that made mistakes such as
>>  labeling Taiwan a "country", wrongly drawing national boundaries, or
>>  omitting important islands including the South China Islands, Diaoyu
>>  Islands and Chiwei Island, said Min.
>>     
>
> I think this will be an increasing problem as OSM gains more momentum.
> For some people, national boundaries have huge political importance,
> and we should perhaps give some thought on how to deal with this
> before we get an edit war wrt Taiwan is a country or wether Kosovo is
> a part of Serbia or not.
>
> Wikipedia has these problems and deals with them (see e.g. this
> article with corresponding discussions:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide), but since OSM is more
> like a sea of data than a set of separate articles, I assume it migt
> be more complex to deal with  in OSM.
>
> I also assume (could not find anything in the wiki) that OSM ideally
> should be politically neutral.
>   
I'm not convinced it's possible to make a map that is politically 
neutral. Maybe we can have the data of all the different view 
points/angles and let the renderers (people) decide about the resulting 
rendering (map). What the reference implementations have to do, is a bit 
hard to tell. Maybe something like: border according to the Chinese, 
border according to the Taiwanese... The only other option is to leave 
disputed areas off. But then you'll have nothing much to render anymore 
soon enough.

Polyglot