boblq([EMAIL PROTECTED])@Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 12:45:23PM -0800: <snip> > > Great idea Tracy. > > Sort of like Wikipedia for geography. Geopedia.net? >
I've heard some say that Wikipedia has been studied to see if inaccurate data would be corrected in a reasonable amount of time. It turns out that after someone creates an entry, the vast majority of people who read it are doing so because they don't know about the topic. So those who could offer correction aren't seeing it, and the errors persist indefinitely. That's old news to lots of us, but I wonder if there would be a similar effect for an open map database. How would you keep it open and still mitigate against errors, innocent or malicious? Classify entries by whether they've been verified. (whatever verification entails) Classify entries by quantity of submissions containing the same coordinate data. (could be abused) Give privileged access to contributors who have provided verified data in the past, while others need to have their submissions verified more stringently. (probably wouldn't work without the next entry) Require all contributors to use a GPG signature and participate in a web of trust. (assuming people are less likely to poison the database if they can be identified) Allow database to be queried by users to include only data they trust. (each record would need fields to hold the values for your "trust criteria". Like submitter, original souce, etc.) What would it really take for an interested community to assemle something like this, reliably? Wade Curry syntaxman -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
