Katie,
Katie Filbert wrote:
This (another neighborhood) is what I've been working on, with very
extensive ground survey + import of buildings, school polygons, etc.
http://osm.org/go/ZZcc60T6
Is this crap??? Are my efforts crap? Is there any reason to stay
involved with OSM?
I'm several thousand miles away and not familiar with that area. It
looks mapped well enough - it looks like something that has received at
least a two-digit number of hours of traditional mapping work, supported
perhaps by a little imported data.
However if *I*, from several thousand miles away, had imported what you
have imported in that area, and not been able to give it the mapping
love you gave it - now that would be crap. Crap unlikely to receive
mapping love from anyone.
OSM thrives on local mappers feeling responsible for their area. If
someone, while mapping their local area (or another area that is somehow
close to their heart), uses an external data set to brush things up, to
add in buildings (which are later locally verified and amended with
house numbers) for example, that's great.
It's just that importing data as a substitute for local mappers doesn't
work, and is more likely to deter than to attract people. Importing
stuff in a place you have never seen with your own eyes is very likely
to result in a crap map, no matter how technically refined your import
is. Any map is a crap map without humans tending to it.
For the record - firstly, I have imported a lot of stuff myself, and
even today I sometimes trace from aerial imagery in areas I've never
visited so I'm not a saint either. Secondly, while I'm a staunch
anti-import guy today, I wasn't at the time when TIGER was imported.
Dave Hansen did most of the work, and I would like to make clear that
just because I now say imports are crap, doesn't mean that Dave did
anything wrong. It seemed like a good idea at the time, even to me.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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