[OSM-talk] Import guidelines proposal update

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 20 September 2012 08:02, Greg Troxel <gdt en ir.bbn.com> wrote:
> I'm mostly a lurker in these discussions, and generally more pro-import
> than many who participate in import decisions.  But I find the 'separate
> account for import' to be an utterly reasonable (along with the rest of
> the guidlines), easy to follow rule, and I am boggled by the objections
> to it.

I haven't followed all of this thread, but here's my experience with
this rule or recommendation.  First of all setting the username
through which you're uploading your edit is such a small issue that it
doesn't really matter for the person uploading. But then I don't see
it as solving any problem compared to source= tagging either on
objects being uploaded, or changeset (often the granularity provided
by tagging entire changesets is completely unpractical and would
result in more than 50% false positives).

Secondly I don't see it as an overwhelming trend currently in OSM.

Thirdly it introduces the problem of how many import accounts to use,
what to name them and potential anonymity of the person uploading the
changes if the account name doesn't contain their nickname.  In the
Spanish community there has been a strong will to follow all the
import guidelines when the Corine Land Cover dataset was being
discussed, analysed and prepared for importing.  The import guidelines
wiki page gave everyone the idea that it would be best to use a single
collective account with the same login details used by all the people
participating.  It's now obvious that this wasn't a good idea because
it was difficult to contact the person who did the actual work in case
there was a need for discussion, on top of that there's the practical
problem of sharing login details.  As with most imports there's days
or weeks (sometimes months) of manual processing that needs to be done
before data is ready for upload to OSM, and this is done by a real
person.  I think the whole point of having accounts in OSM is for the
people uploading their work to be easily contactable.

Fast forward two years and the current (lasting for about a year now)
Spanish cadastre discussions and import attempts have an even stronger
push to follow all the import guidelines because the DWG has blocked
these import attempts on various occasions (which from my point of
view is continuing to damage OSM in Spain because mappers are left in
a limbo -- there's no point drawing building outlines in their towns
from imagery if they have a better source at hand).  Well, this time a
single import account has been registered per province with a single
person coordinating the (potential) imports in each province.  The
assignments have been documented on the wiki.  This is better but the
account names are still not directly linked with real people, and the
division by provinces is artificial because the data was supposed to
be uploaded by users only for the areas they know personally, which
may be on village level for example.

Cheers