[OSM-talk] [OSM-talk-fr] Continued aggression against French contributors (cadastre integration)

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 10/18/12 13:56, Pieren wrote:
> Even if you don't ask, I will reply:
> - no argument has been able to convince people that this rule is
> necessary here (I will not repeat all the arguments already mentionned
> in the past weeks).

That is actually not new in DWG work. It does sometimes happen that we 
cannot convince people that our rules are right. For example, there are 
people who delete a road even though it is there on the ground. We say 
"you shouldn't delete the road; if it is there on the ground, it can be 
in OSM." - they say "but I don't want people to walk past my house all 
the time and your map leads them to it". We say "then use an 
access=private tag", they say "no, that doesn't work".

In the end, we have no choice but to block them; if, even though we 
tried, someone doesn't want to play by the rules then he can't play at all.

Just because you are not convinced that a certain rule is good, doesn't 
mean it doesn't apply to you.

> Where contributors accept many rules (like "do not tag incorrectly for
> the renderer", "do not duplicate", etc), they see this rule as a
> religious "mantra" imposed by a group exceeding his mission.

Yes, and *that* is the problem. This whole discussion is now not about 
"will I spend 5 minutes to create an extra account" (which would be no 
problem for anybody) but about "will I allow those evil non-French 
people to dictate my way of life". And in my eyes, there are a few 
individuals in the French community to blame for this, who have 
essentially whipped up emotions with their fellow countrymen and styled 
this into a big us-versus-them battle which was totally unnecessary.

Would it really be so hard for French data importers to say: "Ok, I 
don't really understand why they want this extra account thing but if it 
makes them happy I'll just do it"? I mean, here we are, the OSM project, 
happily accepting Gigabytes upon Gigabytes of French Cadastre data, 
using OSM's servers to render this into nice map tiles of French cities, 
serving it up to whoever comes asking... can't the French community in 
return just follow such a simple request? Is it really too much to ask?

> Finally, the story is even more ironic. The DWG does not care about
> the quality of the cadastre buildings import and how good they are
> integrated with the existing map as soon as a separate user account is
> used.

Trust me, I do care, and if I had anything to say, the whole Cadastre 
import would be stopped completely until adequate quality control 
measures were in place, and tools and capacities had been developed to a 
point where the Cadastre data would not dwarf everything else on the 
planet. (Just to recap - if someone now downloads a 20 GB planet file, 
1/6 of that is just Cadastre - essentially third-party data mixed in 
with OSM.)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"