[OSM-talk] Scientific paper on "Information Seeding"

[Christoph Hormann]

On Monday 09 October 2017, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> today I was pointed to a recent, open-access scientific paper called
> "Information Seeding and Knowledge Production in Online Communities:
> Evidence from OpenStreetMap". This open-access paper is available
> here
>
> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3044581

Very interesting.

As additional summary: The analysis made is based on the original Tiger 
import which produced a different level of completeness in different 
areas due to differences in the source data and thereby offers fairly 
well defined starting conditions for a comparative analysis.

The analysis and the observations coming from it look pretty solid.  I 
am not fully convinced by the interpretation of the reasons lying 
largely in contributors taking 'ownership' of the data they contribute.  
This would in my eyes - at least if meant in terms of individual 
ownership - require the original contributors at the beginning to 
continue to be significant in terms of overall contribution volume over 
the whole time span analyzed.  This seems rather unlikely considering 
the active contributor turnover we have in general 
(https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Active_contributors_year.png).

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