[OSM-talk] Wikipedia/Wikidata admins cleanup

[john whelan]

I think one issue to try and define is what is the local community?

Canada is big, parts are closer to London UK than Vancouver.

Yes we have a bandwidth of opinions but so does the rest of OSM.

At the moment I'm trying to clean up a bit in Africa.  In many parts there
is no local community.  Morocco is extremely difficult, there are more than
two thousand untagged ways by one mapper many of which are a square with an
arrow pointing away from the square. Many have a note but they look like an
import of some such to me and I'd be delighted if Michael took aim at them.

I think we should be trying to build the community.  We need a balance
between adding data without limits, and building the community and building
the community is hard.  A bit like validation on the HOT side give gentle
guidance and you get better mapping, people feel motivated, tag the tile as
invalid because the project manager who did the validation feels that more
things were mapped on a tile than were requested doesn't help build the
community side of things.  Especially when I checked and the things that
had been mapped had been mapped before the HOT project.

One of the mappers whose opinion I respect in Africa is actually based in
Montreal.  He has travelled a great deal and knows the local conditions and
has good local contacts.  I would say he's part of the local African
community.

My roots are in the UK, I've mapped in the UK using local knowledge.  I
live in Canada.  Am I part of the UK local community of mappers?

I think we have to accept a different standard for imports in different
parts of the world.  Africa has seen a fair number of imports of schools
for example.  Many settlement names have been imported in places they look
like a spreadsheet because the accuracy of the import was limited in the
number of digits after the decimal point.  I haven't seen much activity
from Michael on these imports and to be honest even though they have been
imported and the quality isn't perfect they are being used by end users.
OSM is in use by local government as well as NGOs in Africa they have
nothing better. Should we strip out these imports and demand that only data
from local mappers with hand held GPS devices be allowed into the map?

Cheerio John

On 6 January 2017 at 11:20, Christoph Hormann <chris_hormann at gmx.de> wrote:

> On Friday 06 January 2017, Mikel Maron wrote:
> > [...] http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39517002 is
> > an example. There were issues with this import, sure. This was not
> > vandalism, advertising, or a fatal breakage of the map -- not a
> > situation where an immediate action was justified (and definitely
> > there are other situations where immediate action is needed).
>
> Agreed, this is not how things should be done.  Note Nakaner is not a
> local mapper here nor does he - to my knowledge - routinely map in this
> area.
>
> Note within the Canadian community there is a significant bandwidth of
> opinions regarding the Canvec imports and also significant voices that
> want to stop them and even remove significant parts of the Canvec data
> again.  Still this is ultimately the decisions of the Canadian
> community, even if - to quote myself - it is worth considering
> if "someone sitting in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver [is] really more
> of a local mapper on Devon Island or Ellesmere Island than someone from
> Britain, Germany or Russia?"
>
> --
> Christoph Hormann
> http://www.imagico.de/
>
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> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>
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