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

[Simon Poole]

Am 18.09.2012 15:55, schrieb Pieren:
> On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 3:38 PM, Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> wrote:
>
>> The licence change process in particular turned up a large number of
>> (problematic and others) imports where the importers washed their hands of
>> their responsibility and left the clean up work to others.
> The imports during the redaction work was a problem, I agree. The
> annoucement asking to suspend imports was properly forwarded to the
> local mailing list and local website. But some (most of ?)
> contributors do not read the mailing lists and the OSM web sites.
> That's it. Some even don't read or reply to messages sent to them
> through the OSM messaging system,
The question of (for example of an operational problem) communication to 
active mappers is a technical problem that we will have to address at 
one point in time. Either by assuring that the e-mail address remains 
valid or by other technical means. However that is not the issue in 
question, simply the fact that we have a large number of imports that 
are badly documented or not at all, should not have been imported in he 
first place (incompatible with CC-bs-SA or/and ODbL) and so on.

The French cadastre imports are, as you know, a rather controversial 
subject. In my opinion it is a dataset that doesn't actually increase 
the usefulness of the OSM dataset for most users (building outlines 
without addresses just don't really help with anything) and distracts 
beginner mappers from actually mapping (1st time mappers are recommend 
to immediately start importing insted of going outside). Further more, 
like essentially all imports, the external dataset is not about to go 
away, so there is no reason to prioritize this import over adding useful 
stuff.

BUT the import guidelines do not contain a provision that the data 
imported actually has to be useful and if the French community wants to 
spend (waste?) immense amount of time on this, nobody is going to stop 
it as long as it doesn't severely impact operations and/or use of OSM data.

However it would seem to be a very reasonable, light-weight, requirement 
that the imported data be separated from personal contributions, just as 
we require from other imports (yes I have heard all the stories about 
everything being manually checked etc, if you believe that, I have a 
couple of bridges that I would like to sell to you).

Simon

PS: and I didn't even complained about the 3GB of cadastre source tags 
that we distribute with every planet