[OSM-talk] Nice problem to have

[Toby Murray]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 2:57 AM, Peter Wendorff
<wendorff at uni-paderborn.de> wrote:
> Am 16.03.2012 08:31, schrieb Kai Krueger:
>
>> Kai Krueger wrote
>>>
>>> This imho shows that the publicity of Apple and Foursquare using OSM
>>> directly resulted in new mappers for OSM. Although it isn't the complete
>>> record, that was around the 13th of September 2009 (anyone know if there
>>> was a special occasion arount that time?), it is the second highest
>>> number
>>> yet. Furthermore, with the news so fresh, perhaps we will still beat the
>>> record.
>>>
>> Well, to answer my own question if we can beat the record of most new
>> mappers in a week, it is a resounding yes. This week (beginning 8th of
>> March) saw nearly 3300 new mappers, clearly beating the old record!
>>
>> Richard Fairhurst pointed out that the old record was set in the week
>> Monopoly City Streets launched (a large scale internet game using
>> OpenStreetMap data), so again due to a popular user of OpenStreetMap.
>>
>> So the more large sites use OSM, the faster the mapping community grows
>> and
>> therefore it is imho import for OSM and its community to care about its
>> data
>> consumers as it benefits from them even if they don't "give back".
>>
>> Kai
>>
> On the other hand it might be worth to look on the contributions of these
> additional users.
> How much do they contribute? Do they do more than adding their home or their
> own shop?

How is this different than any other new user?

We have 120,000 accounts (52% of accounts with any edits) with nothing
but 1 or 2 changesets and 180,000 (78%) with fewer than 10 changesets.

And those numbers are from before this week. So I say new users are
new users are new users, no matter where they come from. Most will
make minimal changes. Some will do their town/neighborhood and a very
few will become ongoing active contributers.

Toby