[OSM-talk] weeklyOSM #382 2017-11-07-2017-11-13

[Andy Townsend]

On 17/11/2017 17:52, Mikel Maron wrote:
> Yes, doing this is hard work, and appreciate the job WeeklyOSM has to 
> do. Point is, statements like "Yuri is as unreasonable as before and 
> tries to ignore all the unwritten rules in OSM" is inappropriate, and 
> there are many better ways to summarize the topic.

Well to be fair, the article as written didn't actually say that - it 
said "is perceived by many as unreasonable".

Full disclosure - I'm an occasional contributor to the weekly OSM 
newsletter.  I didn't add or edit that article (actually I didn't 
contribute to any last week - you can usually tell the ones I've written 
because they have more links and perhaps too many words in them), but 
although perhaps a little over-concise I don't think you could argue 
with "perceived by many as unreasonable" - just wade through the recent 
archives of the talk mailing list again and weigh the arguments for and 
against.  Also, there is such a thing as "fake balance".  Imagine you're 
running an article about someone who's discussing ways to offset the 
problems caused by the Mercator projection; you don't then need to also 
quote someone from the Flat Earth Society for the sake of impartiality.

Secondly - and this is a point that applies to many other areas of OSM 
too - there seem far more people willing to contribute their 
copy-editing skills here on a mailing list than actually helping put 
_next_ week's newsletter together.  It's not a new phenomenon - a short 
while ago WeeklyOSM had a complaint from an OSM-centric organisation 
(let's call it "X") that "we never report on what's happening with X".  
It was politely suggested to the complainer that perhaps they ought to 
volunteer themselves; then they could submit all the articles they 
like.  It went very quiet after that.

It's a similar situation with technical discussions elsewhere ("you 
ought to render X like Y", "you ought to change how the osm.org website 
works so I don't have to build infrastructure for $project", "Nominatim 
ought to support my $odd_non_address_search_example").

Although there's always room for improvement, much of what's around OSM 
now has a surprisingly low bar for entry, whether it's creating a map 
based on OSM data that shows $favourite_but_quite_rare_tag, or answering 
questions on the help site or forum, or as here, volunteering to submit 
and review a few news articles a week.

Best Regards,
Andy

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