[OSM-talk] immutable=yes Fwd: DEC Lands

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Russ Nelson wrote:
> Obviously the potential  
> exists for a revert war, but given that I have a reasonable claim for  
> my authority (e.g. http://rutlandtrail.org/list.cgi), why would  
> someone else edit data that I am more expert in?

Your mistake, if you allow me to say to bluntly, lies in claiming 
absolute authority. You assume that your authority is paramount and 
nobody in their right mind - whether they have ever heard of you and 
your credentials or not - would have to believe you over Joe Mapper.

Assumptions of this kind don't work well with a project like 
OpenStreetMap because we generally don't have, and don't want to impose, 
such a structure.

("For the avoidance of doubt", the following is a long-term vision, not 
an idea we should implement tomorrow.)

However if you could turn the thing around and use your authority to 
create something like a "seal of approval" and establish processes 
around that, then instead of threatening to delete other people's data 
you would simply say: "Edit all you want but I will only give my seal of 
approval to data I consider correct." - and those who have reason to 
believe that you are an authority on the matter would then indeed prefer 
to use your approved version of objects and disregard edits made by 
other people. There might even be cool tools that allow you to see which 
ones of your approved objects have been changed, and then contemplate 
whether to approve the changed version as well ("approving" would simply 
mean to upload the object with your user id, making you the last person 
to touch it).

That way, those who believe in your claim to authority (or maybe, 
web-of-trust like, those who believe someone else who believes in your 
claim and so on) will see your approved version of things, and those who 
don't will see the latest edits.

If such a structure is established, and it surely will take time until 
the proper tools are developed and so on, then maybe in certain areas we 
will see a kind of quality control boards developing, and maybe some 
large tile providers will choose e.g. not to render anything in North 
America unless it is approved by someone who is in the list of members 
of the quality control board. Whatever.

The core idea to all of this is that everything is voluntary. There 
could be a number of rival quality control boards and everyone could 
choose whom he trusts, or you could ignore all those crazy people and 
just look at the current version of the data.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"