[OSM-talk] Import guidelines proposal update

[sly (sylvain letuffe)]

On vendredi 21 septembre 2012, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Hi,

Hi again,

> This is not about "one rule". This is about the whole question of rules 
> and authority.

No problems, let's also talk about rules and authority. 
But we (french community) are facing one problem right now, not "problems", 
one problem, and this problem appeared one month ago. Are you asking us to 
let go with the only reason that "this will probably, one day, be solved by a 
new document we are secretly discussing" so please wait ? and accept, that, 
during all this discussion M. Norman (from who I have much respect for his 
volounteer work of tracking and stopping vandalism) is still blocking users 
of our community :
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/248
because that poor guy doesn't read english, was following what we've always 
done. With, I admit an terrible error that will also be detected by our own 
radars and that I have starting to discuss the issues with him ?
No.. maybe too late.. that guy might be gone because the DWG doesn't played it 
nice with him. Have we lost a vandal ? have we lost a member ? I couldn't 
tell, nor the DWG can.
Is that building communities ?

> > No need to say what was the previous rule right ?
> 
> You mean the previous rule as in yesterday? Half a year ago? Two years 
> ago? Or back when we had nodes and segments in our data model ;)

Nice try ;-)
But I said "previous" and "rule".
We now have a de facto rule about a "mandatory second import account" right ? 
because if we don't comply, we are blocked, I call this a rule.
What we had to that *previous* rule about "mandatory second import account" ?
Nothing, we had nothing because it wasn't a rule but a strong recommandation.
Therefore, the previous rule to that is "no rules".
No matter how far you go back, dinosaures didn't have any special rules about 
mandatory import accounts.

 
> The current situation is that DWG does their job as they see fit and 
> defines rules they think are necessary.

I've seen that. And I do think I understand why it is so : volonteers, lack of 
time, no time for talking and lack of massive complaints. Therefore, a quick 
law was created so that vandals won't argue they haven't been warn and make 
it faster for quick unarguing bans with as a result, limited numbers of 
imports, wich means less radar alerts over the xk nodes barrier.

That it is enough as a first step if complaints are low, because you are 
probably facing a vandal arguing for himself.
We are not in this case, we have found what we considere a little flaw in this 
procedure and a large part of a community has confirmed that.
Your missing volonteers ? we have
As it been proven that accepting the amendment I'm proposing causes harm to 
the project ? no
what's left ?
I have no other clue than maybe "pride" forcing the DWG not to accept a step 
back.

> So we don't have any. (rules)

Forcing someone to do something arguing there is a text somewhere that says so 
is a rule, or we have missunderstandings...
And I don't argue against all rules, of course not ! we need rules. Blocking a 
mass good data deleting user is good, and should be written as a rule, and 
enforce as such.

> Now there's no written rule for this. If the guy started a thread on the 
> talk list about "where is it written that you need to respond to 
> emails?????" I would not even be able to point to a wiki page - it's 
> simply something that we take for granted.

I do agree that we need flexibilty above rules (that's what judges do), and 
accept that it may have some collateral dommage sometimes.
But what if 50 people comes to you saying that "responding to emails is not 
writent anywhere ?" will you still ignore them and continue answering and 
loosing time ?
Well I guess no, time for rules. Accepted rules of course.

 
> The "separate account" rule is just such a rule, that DWG has created to 
> do their job. I will not continue discussing this: As long as DWG have 
> to clean up the mess they will make the rules governing imports and 
> mechanical edits. Exceptions from the rules can be negotiated with DWG 
> in advance if someone thinks they really need one.

You don't want to discuss that ? If the core of the problem is that the 
DWG "has no time to clean up the mess", therefore is creating rules. That's 
where we should work. What mess ? the data mess ?

> I say "as long as..." because the subsidiarity I mentioned in my post is 
> a real possibility; if the French community has a couple of willing and 
> capable people maybe we could experiment with setting up a sub-DWG 
> responsible for France only. Maybe we should just try it out and see if 
> it improves the situation.

Good ! let's try. What we have to lose by trying ? some complaining users 
having been blocked because they have done bad imports without respect of 
general guidelines and france's cadastre special guidelines ?
That shouldn't change much from now ;-) beside understanding why they've been 
blocked...

-- 
sly
qui suis-je : http://sly.letuffe.org
email perso : sylvain chez letuffe un point org