[OSM-talk] Adding wikidata tags to the remaining objects with only wikipedia tag

[Christoph Hormann]

On Sunday 01 October 2017, Marc Gemis wrote:
>
> If I noticed an inception date on a information sign next to a
> building, is this original research or a secondary source ?

The date on the sign is verifiable as a signed date, not necessarily as 
a date connected to the building.  Historic information like dates from 
before the timeframe witnessed by today's mappers is something that is 
problematic in OSM in general.

As any historian will be able to tell you history as a science is not 
about analyzing events of the past in the same way you analyze present 
day observations in empiric science disciplines but about analyzing and 
interpreting sources - in this way it resembles the approach of 
Wikipedia more than that of OSM.

> If a Wikidata contributor/Wikipedian researches websites like Orbis,
> Onroerend erfgoed, etc and finds different inception dates and
> records them all, is it bad that s/he uses secondary sources instead
> of the information sign on the ground ?

I don't want to judge the different approaches of Wikipedia and OSM - 
both have their pros and cons.  As a contributor i am more comfortable 
with the OSM approach but i would never say that collecting information 
from secondary sources is inherently less valuable than collecting 
empiric data.

> I wonder whether OSM is really always based on original research, or
> whether we sometimes just want to believe this.

Well - human perception is of course always connected to our past 
experience and beliefs, we cannot observe our environment in a truly 
neutral way.  And of course with armchair mapping much of the data in 
OSM is produced by people who have never been near the place they map 
based on the belief that what the image layer they use depicts what is 
actually there (which is sometimes not the case - like with the iconic 
demolished buildings) and that what people think they see in the images 
actually resembles the impression they would have on the ground (which 
is also frequently not the case - prominent example would be here: 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/7142214).  But the key is every 
information in OSM has to be able to stand up to scrutiny by local 
mappers - a local mapper standing in front of the object needs to be 
able to tell if it is correct or not - even if different mappers could 
in borderline cases come to different assessments on the matter.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/