On Sept. 15, a french OSM contributor has been blocked because he was not following the "dedicated account for import" described in the Import Guidelines (http://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/238). There was nothing armful for the data, community or the whole project is these changesets.
This has been a starting point for a discussion between some active french speaking contributors and a couple of DWG members. Its reaching to an important point about DWG and OSMF governance. This block decision is based on the "import guidelines" where the recommendation to use a separate account switched recently to a requirement in last November. I posted a couple of question on the "Import guidelines" talk page on the wiki regarding this "dedicated account" to get some clarification about this switch and some other practical questions (how many dedicated accounts, etc). I'd like to have some answers because after searching the wiki, the OSMF web site and the imports@ mailing-list archives, I could not find any (public) discussion about the newly required dedicated account. This is a major governance problem for me, some guidelines are updated by someone on a wiki page (Nov 15th 2011 by Richard Fairhurst), something that was a recommendation becomes mandatory and then some contributor get blocked based on this wiki page edit that comes from nowhere. If it works like that, it is worth updating the wiki page(s) and set/modify rules on our own. Wiki talk page is here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Import/Guidelines#dedicated_account My questions are: - Who decided this change (recommendation -> requirement) ? - What has been the process that lead to this major change ? - Do we need a separate account for each dataset imported ? - What is the benefit when source=* is required by the original data provider ? - What is the benefit when hundreds/thousands of contributors are upload subsets of a larger dataset after manual review/improvement of the original data ? -- Christian Quest - OpenStreetMap France - http://openstreetmap.fr/u/cquest _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
