[OSM-talk] Sourcing street names - what's the policy, and why?

[Steve Bennett]

On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 2:33 AM, Anthony <osm at inbox.org> wrote:

>
> Furthermore, if you're using more than one source, who's to say whether you
> copied the data from Google and verified it with the other source, or if you
> copied the data from the other source and verified it with Google?
>

Yeah, that's part of why I find this so-called copyrighting of facts...odd.
The name "Thompson Street" just doesn't contain enough creativity to make
this feasible. Imagine Google Maps contained a trap, a little street that
didn't actually exist, and it turned up in the OSM database too. It's hard
to see what they could use that to claim, other than that we copied *that
street*. So we delete it, where's the harm?


>
> On Sat, Jan 2, 2010 at 8:21 AM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> But if I was going to be doing ground surveys, there are lots of places
>> I'd rather visit than these new outer suburban housing developments.
>>
>
> Why aren't you mapping those places instead?
>

Not sure I understand the question. But to clarify: the places I'm
interested in surveying are either country towns, national/state parks, or
places in my city that are good for bike riding. But out of a sense of duty,
I also spend time tracing roads in outer suburban housing developments off
Nearmap - I just don't have any desire to go and visit them, least of all to
spend hours writing down street names, when there are much better places to
get the information from. My time being finite, I'll spend my survey time in
places of maximum utility/interest to me.

Anyway, the answer to my question seems to be "use your own judgment, don't
tell anyone where you got the information from, and everything will be ok".
Which is a weird answer, but ok.

Steve
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