[OSM-talk] Who contributed most?

[Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists)]

Lars Aronsson wrote:
>Sent: 10 March 2009 9:21 PM
>To: talk at openstreetmap.org
>Subject: [OSM-talk] Who contributed most?
>
>
>In the discussion about the license change, somebody mentioned the
>idea that we might have to delete contributions by users who
>refuse to agree to the license change or by users who we fail to
>contact.
>
>I have no idea if that suspicion is real or not, but it made me
>think: Has anybody tried to estimate the size of contributions
>from an individual user?  Only counting the number of edits
>doesn't say much, because a user can make many small edits to
>convert roundabouts from squares to circles, another user
>contributes streetnames to an already mapped city, a third user
>has mapped the country roads of an entire county.  We sometimes
>hear that OSM has 100,000 registered users, but many haven't
>contributed much.  Well, how many have contributed much?  Who
>contributed the most?  For a particular region, such as Sweden,
>who are the 20 or 200 most valuable contributors?  Do we know?
>
>I think this has an interest (or at least curiosity) on its own,
>quite independent of the license change.
>

I can't give any precise details but as I recall I think only about 30% of
our user base have ever contributed anything to the map data. Then looking
at my own area (which may or may not be typical) I see that 90% of the data
is contributed by 10% of the contributors. So if that scales then we might
have 90% contributed by 3,000 users but a more in depth analysis of change
using planet data would probably throw up a more reliable set of figures.
Also, Germany has more contributors than anywhere else and I don't know if
the 90%/10% rule applies well there or not.

Cheers

Andy


>
>--
>  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
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