[OSM-talk] Worldwide non-surveyed tag edits

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 16/06/2014, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> On 06/13/2014 04:57 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
>>>  To sum it up: please stop treating/regarding "gardeners" differently
>>>  from "surveyors". If a distinction is to be made (and gradual levels
>>>  defined), it's between large and small edits.
>>
>> the most important distinction I see is the one between edits in an area
>> you know and those in an area you don't know.
>
> Absolutely.
>
> [Skiping Richard's goods arguments]

Of course local mapping will always be better (once we ignore newbie
mistakes and assume that everybody's technical skill improves over
time).

But. from the POV of the contributor in an already-mapped area, it's
very time-consuming (and often ultimately impossible) to diagnose
wether a particular bit of data was contributed by a local, an expert
in the field, or even surveyed at all. It makes that "local mapper"
quality pretty much irrelevant (despite being so valued) because we
can't measure it.

What we do instead is the next best thing : apraising the data on its
own merit and eventually contacting the original mapper for more info.
That last step is sometimes skiped because it slows things down a lot,
can fail (especially with small contibutors), or is overkill for the
changeset considered.


To get back to the original topic, the scale of a changeset is often
the best indicator that a changeset needs to be looked at carefully
(ideally before upload) by the community. There are definitely other
changesets which would benefit from a review (such as the ones that
started this thread) but they're not as easy to spot or define.