On Wednesday 29 August 2018, Frederik Ramm wrote: > > Actually, this does not only apply to imports but also to concerted > mapping efforts - quote from a post that Pierre Beland made on > osm-talk just yesterday: "The number of contributors is limited in > Africa and the risk is that errors created by mapathons while > participating to Crisis responses stay as is for years."
Yes, this is important to be clear about - what Facebook & Co. produce with algorithms is not necessarily objectively worse than what mappers produce - you can find many cases where manual mapping has added the most ridiculous geometries and tags. You could say that manual mapping can be both worse than what the worst bot mapper produces and better than even the most sophisticated algorithms (and i am confident to include in that the forseeable future). What we really need is to get the directed editing policy finalized. because the problem with using algorithms in mapping is not the algorithms per se, it is the way the algorithms and their results are used, how this is organized and the lack of meaningful mandatory quality control to a non-negotiable minimum standard when this is done in an organized fashion. Having a clear framework for organized mapping activities also helps the organizations involved in such. Right now it is clearly visible that there is a lot of confusion how to document and communicate organized activities - some just don't care while others try to work responsibly but in the absence of a clear framework of rules and requirements this is very hard. But i also would like to keep the import review process free of the political discussion. Although some people seem to have the impression this is meant to discourage imports and make them more difficult it is in fact more a service provided by the OSM community to those who want to import data to improve the quality of their work. You are required to follow these rules but in return you receive free advise. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
