Frederik Ramm writes: > My, very personal, answer to this is that OSM is part of a greater > movement of collaborative productivity, where people all over the world > can and do join forces to create something great, something of value.
Okay. Can you see how judicious imports *are* that collaboration and joining of forces? For example, I live in St. Lawrence County, NY. (http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/87775). I've been most places in the county, and an familar with it generally. It's mostly empty. Most of the counties inside the Adirondack park are even more empty. Ain't no people there to make the map better. Now, if I can get the data to make the map better, why, that *is* me collaborating with the other mappers in my area. Which is to say, me. But because it's local to me, I've backed it up with field work, and so I can say that the data is in pretty good shape, and I'm happy that it's there. I also map railroads in New York State. My only "collaborator" is NE2. I've imported a lot of my existing maps into OSM. Again, ain't nobody else doing it, and I'm not going to sit on the data that I created over the course of years, and not import it just because you think I should sit around and wait for somebody else to show up to help me. Do I want people to help? Only if they're going to actually help, and not pessimize the work I've done by, oh, say, changing useful non-controversial tags like name= to a tag that they invented. That is, of course, the downside of this wonderful collaborative productivity. Now, the flip side of your idea of collaboration is that I knew about OSM, knew that my county was largely empty, and knew that TIGER would be a great starting point. So I DID NOT do any editing until TIGER got uploaded. Your theory is great, but I'm a refutation of it. I'm also only one person, so you might be mostly right. I just don't think so. -- --my blog is at http://blog.russnelson.com Crynwr supports open source software 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315-600-8815 Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | Sheepdog _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
