[OSM-talk] Import guidelines & OSMF/DWG governance

[Pieren]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 12:13 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer
<dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:

> not sure about this, but I definitely support the decision, because it
> was a real problem in the past when imports could not easily be
> distinguished from individual and original contributions.

Excepted that in the mentionned case, the French cadastre building
footprints import is localized (scale is a municipality, a town or a
village) and the features are limited to buldings and possibly
waterways. All imported elements are also sourced and uploads are
limited to one or few changesets. So the problem to distinguish
individual and original contribution does not exist here.

The problem is that the guideline is writing for mass imports which is
not always the case for all imports. Here in France, we also import
administrative boundaries from the same source. It is done carefully
and manually since years now. The task is so huge (36.0000
municipality boundaries at the end) that we crowdsource it. We also
have a tool to monitor such data (osmose). We cannot ask each
contributor to create a special account each time he is importing
something into OSM which is not coming from Bing or its GPS. And if
creating a new user account would be that easy, but it requires a
special, different email account each time for each new account
(excepted for those who are old enough in OSM and created tens of
accounts before this restriction was in place). Only this point is
creating a barrier to import any thing in general into OSM (which is,
I suspect, the real target of the DWG at the end).

What I would like to know here is if the DWG is allowed to block one
contributor just because he is not following one of the requirements
writen on the wiki guidelines, a requirement which was just an option
few months ago. The DWG is claiming that the import guideline is
writen by the community. But how many people have been involved in the
discussion deciding to change the wiki and make a separate account a
"must" instead of a recommendation ? And where was it discussed ? If 5
people decided to make it an obligation, can 5 other people decide to
change the wiki back to an option ?

I agree with the concept of seperate accounts but only for large
imports done by a single person in a short time. All the opposite of
the small French cadastre imports done by the crowd since years on
limited areas. The guideline contains other recommendations which are
also requested to our importers (like "integrate with the existing
data). We also wrote our own guideline to avoid bad, unprepared, blind
imports. Unfortunatelly, we also have some "black sheeps" not
following it. In this case, the French community is big and mature
enough to contact the persons, repair and revert them or even ask the
DWG to block one person until he reads our messages. But this was not
the case for the mentionned person.

For all of these reasons, I would like to modify the import guidelines
and make the separate account back to a recommendation which is not
alsways necessary, especially in case of limited imports, in size
and/or features.

Pieren