On Wednesday 24 April 2019, Jarek Piórkowski wrote: > > I like imports, but for quite another reason: > > As an OpenStreetMap editor, a resident of a largely empty country, > and a human, I am interested in imports as otherwise the map of where > I live will remain full of blank spots for decades. I want to see a > map in the default OpenStreetMap.org layer, not a blank.
I am aware that there are a lot of perfectly valid reasons why people want OSM to be a project focusing on collecting useful geodata and less on cooperatively assembling local knowledge of human mappers. The problem is that these two visions of OSM are mutually exclusive. If you want OSM to focus on cooperatively assembling local knowledge you have to accept that the only way you are going to fill blank spots in the map is by motivating people to acquire local knowledge of these areas and sharing it in OSM and that imports can only work in a support role for craft mapping and not to fill in blank spots. > I understand this is not a large motivator for humans in countries > that do not have thousands of square kilometers of wilderness per > possible mapper, let alone active mapper. But some understanding of > our position would be appreciated. This is an idea (or rather an accusation of course) that i have heard occasionally in the past - interestingly almost exclusively from people from Canada. The irony of this is that you are telling this to someone who has done 90 percent of his mapping work in areas far more remote and wild than any place you have most likely considered to do an import in. So frankly i have very little understanding for your special position here. Have you considered that one of the reasons why the active mapping community in Canada is so small is that you are discouraging potential craft mappers (in particular also ones from abroad) with the imports? Anyway - lets not loose track of the subject here. I made kind of a fundamental statement here in response to Peda's suggestion for adjusting the rules for imports but i don't think this should overshadow the specific discussion of the import in Sweden. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
