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

[Lester Caine]

Frederik Ramm wrote:
> 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.

Frederik - I don't think those suggestions are appropriate in the light of 
Eugene's explanation. His reasoning is not unreasonable, but as you have 
indicated it will not get much in the way of outside support! Governments are 
now trying to limit access to material that they object to, and personally I 
doubt that simply hiding 'landuse=military' would have any influence if a 
country decided that they wanted control of their own country mapping and they 
will attempt to block OSM anyway?

If the information is in the public domain, then it should be mapped correctly 
in the master database. I can quite appreciate that on a local basis people 
adding that data may be subject to 'risk' due to local laws, but in many cases 
this data has been added by reference to outside material so there is no 
problem. If local contributors correct that information where it is wrong, than 
that is to be encouraged, but 'incorrectly' updating data is not acceptable.

Providing a 'locally' filtered view of the data for local consumption does not 
solve the problem Eugene is trying to address. While the current proposal seems 
innocuous to the PocketGis contributors, it is a 'slippery slop' that the rest 
of the world does not want to start down? If RUSSIA's secret data is sanitised, 
then how many other counties are going to expect the same treatment?

Can you see the problem Eugene? We simply can't say yes to any incorrect mapping!

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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