On Tue, Apr 4, 2017 at 4:51 PM, Charlotte Wolter <techl...@techlady.com> wrote:
> I wrote to TIGER about the false "driveways" issue that I > discovered, and got a reply from Anne O'Connor of TUGER. Apparently it is a > known issue, but they would like to hear about any others that we may find. > > For what it's worth, a number of our issues are fixed in current versions of TIGER. The TIGER import was a one-time affair, and for various good and bad reasons, is unlikely to be repeated. It provided OSM with an initial map in the US, later revealed to be of questionable quality. Whether that actually helped build an OSM community is a controversial topic. Some believe that the presence of so much almost-correct data is an impediment to recruiting mappers, others that it is a help. (I suspect it depends on whether your friends see an empty area and say, "sure, I'll help fill it," or whether they say instead, "why should I bother with this? There's nothing there!") In any case, trying to fix the problem "upstream" is unlikely to help. From the perspective of OSM, the TIGER import is what it is, and of course needs fixing, but we and the GIS people at the Census Bureau have gone our separate ways. I post this message mostly because I know that as an OSM newbie, I saw all the TIGER data and (partly because of all the gobbledygook that looked like foreign database keys) thought of it as being from an authoritative source. I was afraid to edit even obvious mistakes because I mistakenly thought that was likely to interfere with conflating official updates. How wrong I was! Now, I have no compunctions at all about deleting objects that came in from TIGER or making corrections to them. There's a lot that's wrong with the import systemically, and a lot that's wrong with it locally. Around here, a lot of TIGER ways are outright hallucinations, and I'm not afraid to delete or edit them. In private emails, I've joked about all the "TIGER [excrement]" in the database, and referred to the process of making it more closely match reality as, "cleaning the cat box." It was surely much better than nothing, and importing it may well have been the right move at the time. But it was the start of a long process of building the map, not the end of it, and a significant fraction of OSM'ers believe that it was a bad idea in the first place. Actual human mappers have put in enough effort correcting it that further bulk updates from newer versions of TIGER would be regarded as vandalism.
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