[OSM-talk] Zero tolerance on imports

David Murn davey at incanberra.com.au
Sun Feb 20 08:32:17 GMT 2011


On Sat, 2011-02-19 at 19:40 -0800, Daniel Sabo wrote:

> Maybe you don't like it, but you are not the entire OSM community. Yes,
> in this case someone overwritten what I presume was good surveyed data
> with an import was stupid. But in general the fact that data was
> gathered by a government surveyor with tools an order of magnitude
> more accurate than ours does not, IMHO, make it less "worthy" of being
> in OSM.

As was stated in the previous email, OSM isnt designed to simply be an
API for people to load government data into.  Your comment about the
'order of magnitude more accurate than ours', shows that maybe you need
to read about the airport import, where some airports were added many
kilometres away from their accurate location, or several cases reported
here in the last few weeks of deleted surveyed data and tags, replaced
with generic un-verified tags.

Yes, some imports are good, especially when the community is consulted
and comes up with a proper way to import/tag/maintain them, but if one
individual just decides to use their own data sources, with their own
tags without consultation with the community, it almost always leads to
more damage than added value.  Its no good doing an import that 'saves'
20 hours of handwork, if it takes 100 hours of handwork to correct it.
One practical example of this, was when I made a cross-country trip last
year, and found some fuel stations were mapped upto 100km away from
their real location.  Imagine if someone was relying on that data, in a
remote area if could be life-endangering, or worse imagine if it was a
hospital import. Some things Id rather not have mapped, than to have
them mapped possibly inaccurately, or to at least have renderers show
imported data with a warning to be wary of its accuracy.

David




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