[OSM-talk] Abnormal votings on military objects in RU wiki part; PocketGIS madness

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Eugene Iline wrote:
> And that is all that happens. It seems to me that this little local rule 
> of excluding landuse=military on the territory of Russian Federation 
> will give OSM in Russia clear chanses not to be negatively influenced by 
> state officials. 

It is perfectly ok for you to create a copy of OSM data with 
landuse=military removed or changed to something else, or any other 
"little local rules" you think appropriate.

I guess that you could even use the OSM dev server for such an 
endeavour, or otherwise get technical support from the community if you 
need it.

The one thing that is *not* ok is changing existing landuse=military 
tags *in the main database* to something else. This is the one important 
thing I took from Komяpa's message - people attempting to remove 
information from OSM hoping to please their government. If he was wrong 
about this, then all the better. If he was right, then no matter what 
you tell me about Komяpa's "emotional comprehension of the situation", 
your proposed actions are detrimental to OSM and I have to thank him for 
bringing them to a wider attention.

It is certainly good to have this discussion, and I may have the benefit 
of living in a country which doesn't care a lot about these things[*], 
but my opinion is that we should not make our maps lie just to be more 
palatable to any country's current government. If a country is not 
mature enough for community mapping and the un-controllable spread of 
information that goes along with it, then OSM cannot thrive in that 
country and I'd rather not map there at all.

Bye
Frederik

[*] OSM Germany were recently contacted by someone in the military and 
asked to remove two specific buildings from the map. We declined and 
pointed out that these exact buildings were also on a public site map on 
the official web site of the location in question.