[OSM-talk] "NRCS basic OSM training" - low quality changesets in Nepal

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 21.06.2017 23:48, Dan Joseph wrote:
> NRCS stands for Nepal Red Cross Society, so the people behind the edits
> are part of the local community.

The word "community" is used in a lot of different ways in OSM. When I
speak of "the local community" I ususally mean "the OSM mappers who live
there", not "anyone who lives there".

I'd like to echo Pieree's question - are the NRCS in touch with KLL
because that would certainly help avoid a lot of beginner problems *and*
not require English.

> I would also guess that changeset comments were not
> part of the training.

Then the training is seriously lacking.

> Errant keys are relatively straight-forward to
> find and fix in JOSM. If the tag value is legitimate local knowledge
> then a little bit of cleanup work is worth it.

I don't know about the localisation status of the software. Many of the
problems mentioned here would trigger warnings with standard editing
software. Is it possible that these warnings are not translated and
mappers are taught to just hit "continue" whenver there's a popup they
don't understand?

> Someone at the Nepal RC
> who does some GIS work is aware of the data quality issues and working
> to fix it.

With that, I hope they mean they will fix the training and not fix the
problems. They are not doing well by the local volunteers if they
provide them with training that results in most of their edits having to
be corrected by someone else (worst case, someone else without knowledge
of land or language).

It would be interesting to know what the aims of this programme are, and
how many volunteers are recruited/trained to do exactly what.

> Changeset comments such as "It's likely we
> have to fully delete it because it would take days to clean everything
> up by hand." when talking about local knowledge added by locals seems
> against the spirit of OSM.

Well it depends on just how much pre-existing data was broken. If things
are newly added and the tagging is bad, then the worst that will happen
is that the data rots away unused. If however existing data - that was
presumably added by locals with local knowledge - is broken then it is
possible that the net worth of the contribution is below zero.

This is of course something that an institution training volunteers
should not allow to happen because not only will it was the the time of
the volunteers in question *and* others in OSM who repair the damage, it
would also throw a bad light on the organisation itself and the way they
plan and staff their activities.

I am concerned about a changeset comment quoted by Andy in another
message: "Stop destroying detailed map using generalization tools. In
developing countries like Nepal eactly map can save human life." --
while this is certainly impolite, if this is talking about the NRCS
edits discussed here, it points to existing data being reduced in value
by the new contributions. People don't usually say something like that
if someone just uses a wrong tag or accidentally moves a house.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"