[OSM-talk] Detrimental to the OSM database (was: Ways needing smoothing back on track)

Martijn van Exel m at rtijn.org
Sat Aug 23 00:30:59 UTC 2014


Dave, 

MapRoulette challenges have been designed specifically with the armchair mapper in mind - no local knowledge should be required to fix what MapRoulette asks you to fix. 

If you can provide factual evidence that MapRoulette (or its new cousin MapBoxRoulette) are causing significant harm to OpenStreetMap data, please let me know and - at least for MapRoulette - I can see about appropriate measures. These could include providing better instructions, or even taking down a particular challenge - as I have done in the past. 

My extensive experience preparing MapRoulette challenges, listening to feedback from its users and looking at lots and lots of edits made by MapRoulette users all point to the conclusion that this is a good way to get a lot of eyes on particular problems, and get them fixed much, much faster than would otherwise have been possible. 

In a perfect world, we’d have local mappers everywhere. In the real world, we can use all the help we can get. MapRoulette gets help to some of the remote, forgotten places.
-- 
Martijn van Exel

From: Dave F. <davefox at madasafish.com>
Reply: Dave F. <davefox at madasafish.com>>
Date: August 22, 2014 at 6:16:33 PM
To: Martijn van Exel <m at rtijn.org>>, maproulette at openstreetmap.org <maproulette at openstreetmap.org>>, OSM Talk <talk at openstreetmap.org>>
Subject:  Re: [OSM-talk] Detrimental to the OSM database (was: Ways needing smoothing back on track)  

Hello All

Please include all replies to OM-Talk:

I was meaning to start a separate thread on this subject, but this seems the appropriate time & place.

This website, along with http://osmlab.github.io/to-fix/ ( & maybe others) are encouraging errors to be introduced to the OSM database.

For obvious reasons there's a discouragement of armchair mapping. These sites take it another step into inaccuracy by asking you to randomly correct a supposed error ( & I /really/ want to emphasise 'supposed') that the user can have no factual knowledge of whether the error is true or not. 

I live in the UK. How can I possibly know if there's genuinely a "sharp angle" in Arizona or there's something less than 2 metres away from another object that should be connected in Cambodia?

IMO these websites are detrimental to the OSM database & should be rescinded. 

Dave F.

On 22/08/2014 22:25, Martijn van Exel wrote:
Hi all - just wanted to let you know that the ‘Ways Needing Smoothing’ MapRoulette challenge is finally being updated again. It used to consist of mostly false positives for the past week, and there still are some, but there should be some fun to be had there still :)

http://maproulette.org/#t=waysneedingsmoothing/

It’s still U.S. only :( but we’re getting closer to being able to doing it for other countries as well.
-- 
Martijn van Exel



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