[OSM-talk] Some thoughts against remote mapping

[Simon Poole]

Am 16.06.2015 um 01:40 schrieb Clifford Snow:
> Following this thread makes me wonder how people feel about some of the
> issues raised. The link below is quick survey about some of the issues
> raised in the thread. Please take a minute or two to respond. If I get
> sufficient answers I will publish the results.

Nobody is actually claiming that "imports stunt community growth",
that's just a contraction of "early infrastructure imports stunt
community growth".

Which is why I tend to be very careful to use the later, unluckily most
people aren't, which produces lots of spin doctor fodder (actually it
would be even better to be more precise and say ... transportation
infrastructure ...).

Mature communities normally don't have the need to import transportation
infrastructure (aka roads etc) and I doubt if a well done landuse import
would directly have a negative effect on a budding one (historically
naturally most landuse imports have simply made a big mess of
everything, but that is a different topic).

Adding roads and similar objects is one of the simplest and fastest
things to do in OSM, and typically the one with the most immediate
award. It is naturally at the same time the thing to map that you tend
to run out of fastest, so by its very nature it will only have an effect
early on in a communities history.

Now I could imagine if we had access to large "complete" POI datasets we
might be able to see a similar effect later on, but all such imports
tend to be topical and only remove a small part of available objects to
map.

Here, obviously a relative mature community, we've had two larger
imports (public transport stops and admin boundaries) that were done by
the community and naturally they haven't had an impact on community
growth (they do have other import related negative aspects, but that
again is a different topic).

Simon


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 488 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20150616/13ba89f7/attachment.sig>