Alex, > Start with a Google search and note how long it's going to take you to get > to a place where 'consult on imports at osm.org' or similar are mentioned. In > the middle of a novel-length document that says 'These guidelines are not > definitive - they are not laws' in its intro :p
I have to disagree with your means of research here. Importing data into OSM is a complex thing that requires familiarity with the project, with the technology behind it, with the community, and the established means of communication. Not mastery - familiarity is enough. Ignorance isn't. This is a bare minimum requirement that we cannot do away with. Even if we could sell magic pills that would allow you to do an import ten minutes after you've heard of OSM for the first time, we would not want to do it. You don't have to go to conferences *and* local meetings *and* read the mailing lists *and* read help.osm.org *and* be familiar with the wiki to do an import. But if you do *nothing* of all this then we certainly don't want you importing. I hope that so far this is noncontroversial. Then, for someone who is at least *minimally* familiar with OSM, would they really "start with a Google search" as you did in your example above? I typed "import" in the help.openstreetmap.org search box and *every* halfway relevant question (not counting "how do I importd addresses into Nominatim" etc) had the right pointers in their answer section. Type "import" in the Wiki search box and you get the same. Or look at any "import" themed post on the mailing lists or the forums and again, the same. There's absolutely nothing to be said against improving the existing documentation. (If the plan is not to create US-specific import documentation but modifying what's there on the wiki, then I'd suggest to coordinate that effort on the imports list instead of imports-us, to avoid the impression that this was an effort to bring American import rules to the masses.) But frankly, even with the best documentation on the Wiki, you will *still* have exactly the same cases as this - someone not spending enough time (even if "enough" was only five minutes) to find it and later crying foul for perceived unfair treatment and/or missing or difficult-to-find documentation. If our documentation is hard to find then we can improve that. If our importers don't care to find it, that's something we will have difficulty fixing. We could potentially help the situation by detecting imports in the editor (preferrable but not foolproof) or the API or some downstream analysis tool (more difficult) and then rejecting an edit if it is determined to be an import but doesn't come from a pre-authorised source. But in the end the end that boils down to trying to solve a social problem by technical means. People would probably still find ways to import data without consultation and later claim that they couldn't possibly have known because our documentation is a mess. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ Imports-us mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports-us
