[OSM-talk] Wikipedia/Wikidata admins cleanup

[Oleksiy Muzalyev]

Canada is the second largest country in the world by area. I understand 
only too well how inaccessible and unexplored a land with a harsh cold 
climate could be as I was born and grew up in a remote part of Siberia.

However, the situation changes nowadays. There is now a lot of 
innovation in clothing, footwear, and especially in ultra-light sleeping 
mats for trekking, sleeping bags, navigation devices, tents, and even 
light aluminum tent spikes for snow. This modern technology allows 
tourists to access cold areas more or less safely.

For example, the documentary film in English "Surviving in the Siberian 
Wilderness for 70 Years" https://youtu.be/tt2AYafET68 was seen on 
Youtube more than two and a half million times. It is a film about a 
religious family who lived in a forest in a complete isolation for 
several decades. And a lot of people hike to this compound now. I read 
recently that even a group of school pupils hiked several hundred 
kilometers to visit it.

I mapped several lakes around this compound 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3645095042 via satellite imagery. A 
lake could be very useful, as it takes much more fuel to melt snow than 
ice. Besides, the water from snow does not provide minerals to a human 
body. It could be possible sometimes to cut through ice till the water 
of a lake.

Unfortunately the long footpath leading to this compound is not visible 
on satellite photos. If this footpath was mapped it would be a major 
security feature for many hikers, and it could also save some expenses 
to the rescue service. But it is possible to map it only via a GPS 
track, it means an expedition of preferably 7 or more people would have 
to go along it. Seven or more because it is a bear land, and no attacks 
being recorded against parties of more than seven people.

I think the remote areas should be mapped carefully, as it is not 
possible to ask for directions there. And tourists, sometimes young 
students, do venture there more and more. The trekking equipment for it 
is readily available via Internet shopping.

With best regards,
Oleksiy



On 06.01.17 22:22, john whelan wrote:
> ...
> We have more lakes in Canada than exist in the whole of Europe.  Most 
> are fairly inaccessible and there is little economic incentive to map 
> each one to a high degree of accuracy. In many provinces they simply 
> haven't spent the cash to map them accurately and recently.  Some data 
> is forty or more years old.  So digging into the source of the CANVEC 
> data can help to determine how accurate it is.
>
> We don't have many mappers per square km in Canada and mapping with a 
> GPS trace doesn't happen at minus 30 for some reason. If I go back in 
> time to before I imported the CANVEC road data into Ottawa basically 
> Ottawa OpenStreetMap was incomplete, inaccurate, over 140 reads had 
> the wrong name when I compared them to the City of Ottawa map. The 
> City of Ottawa map wasn't license to copy but I could at least compare 
> the two.  Locally some imports had been done but anywhere an existing 
> road was in the map an area round the existing road was not imported. 
> Fine except that roads were not joined up.  You couldn't find a route 
> between two streets in the city.
>
> ...

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