[OSM-talk] Zero tolerance on imports

[Robert Kaiser]

Peter Budny schrieb:
> The thing is, whether the work is done by humans or robots, how are you
> going to know if it's right?

Now here's the actual argument why automated imports are often a bad 
thing: A lot of data is being added to the database *without being 
checked by anyone* for its quality. You might have seen the Example of 
plan.at in Austria in this thread, we had and have significant problems 
with the data imported from there because some of it is very bad quality 
and has been automatically connected with ways from existing surveyed 
and checked data, so often you can't even easily delete the wrong data 
again without doing harm.

The most important reason why we need actual people to do work on the 
data is because they can check the quality by e.g. going there 
themselves, looking at multiple satellite images, etc. - of course 
including one of the most important items where OSM wins against a lot 
of other map material: local knowledge of the editors.

Robert Kaiser