On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 10:06 AM, Frederik Ramm <[email protected]> wrote: > I only posted that on the talk list and not here, so for those on > talk-us who don't read talk and who are familiar with the "imports are > always bad for the community" discussion, you might want to have a look > at a scientific paper recently written by Abhishek Nagaraj (UC > Berkeley-Haas) which finds that: > > "... a higher level of information seeding significantly lowered > follow-on knowledge production and contributor activity on OpenStreetMap > and was also associated with lower levels of long-term quality." > > The paper can be freely downloaded here > https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3044581 and there > has been a little discussion about it over on the talk list, here: > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2017-October/079116.html
Interesting. The interesting take-away is that there may be an ideal level of 'information seeding' so that potential contributors are initially attracted to the platform (if there's nothing there, there's no reason to believe that your contribution will ever have value) and not driven off by a sense that the job is done. The 'inverted U' effect is hypothesized several times in the paper. I'm a post-TIGER mapper, so the TIGER import has always been part of my environment. I know that when I was a beginner, one thing that quite put me off trying to improve it was all the noise tags that came with the import. Since at the time, I had no idea what the purpose of that information was, much less that it serves no purpose whatsoever, I was reluctant to edit TIGER ways for fear of breaking something. In the environment we live in now, we certainly need some way to encourage new mappers to go ahead and break things. (I know, this argument is anecdotal, but I can't even think of how I could set out to test it.) I also think the balance shifts some in the places where there simply are never going to be enough mappers. I could, in theory, lawfully get out in the field and survey the boundaries of the big parks, for instance. But the boundaries don't move much, and there aren't enough people like me with the necessary motivation and skills. But people relate to parks, and react badly to an argument that they shouldn't be on the map unless someone has devoted that sort of effort. (Someone has. The state surveyor. And even the state survey may reblaze the bounds only once or twice a century.) Remember that in my part of the word, there are even indefinite county boundaries. County lines that have never been surveyed and monumented. (It messes up everyone's idea of topology not to draw lines on the maps, so people do.) I think the ideal level of imports is greater than zero and less than TIGER. We'll go on arguing about where the maximum value is along that curve, and that's a good thing. In the meantime, we all try to improve the map, and to recruit mappers - which, we see, are sometimes conflicting goals. _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
