[OSM-talk] Portal for users/casual mappers (Re: Tagging FOR the renderer)

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 19/05/2015, Bryce Nesbitt <bryce2 at obviously.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:14 AM, Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> wrote:
>>
>> You must have misunderstood something there, the top 50'000 (roughly 10%
>> of all) or so mappers have contributed essentially all (roughly 95%)
>> data to OSM. The long tail is not unimportant, but from a pure volume
>> point of view OSM is very dependent on its core contributors. Not that
>> this is a surprise or different than any other similar enterprise.
>>
>
> Keep in mind the type of contribution is different.
>
> This year I edited 250,000 trees with a bad tag.  That's a huge number of
> nodes, but not a significant contribution of knowledge.
> The "long tail" editors on the other hand may be supplying data in unique
> ways requiring local knowledge.

It's also likely that prolific contributors will work on mostly
armchair-mappable stuff, while the long tail will just add a
particular POI they care about. So once the initial basemap is "done"
by big contributors, I expect the number of changesets (but not the
amount of data) to shift toward long tail contributors.

Arguably, the long tail is what crowdsourcing is all about. But to
make it possible, we first need a huge amount of data, which comes
from top contributors. Both contributor profiles are necessary for
OSM.