On 21.02.2011 00:47, Daniel Sabo wrote:
On Feb 20, 2011, at 3:16 PM, Felix Hartmann wrote:
Couldn't agree more to it. Imports kill community and scare novices away.
...
Most important things for OSM are good aerial photos coupled with large community. Worst
are imports. The United States are so bad, I don't think OSM will ever become important
there. The biggest thing to remember is that "creating" something is much more
fun than correcting it. Imports make OSM a chore and no fun.
As a former novice I completely disagree with you here. If the TIGER import
hadn't happened I would have had zero interest in OSM, a vast empty map is not
very inspiring.
But really, no one here has hard data, whenever we say "it destroys the community" or "it
helps the community" we're just throwing anecdotes at each other. What we need are better tools to
build a community like Serge and Kevin are talking about, a dozen of us arguing on a mailing list about what
360k people "really want" isn't going to accomplish much.
- Daniel
Well we have no hard data, but evidence. Basically no users and editors
in the US but loads in Europe. And loads of countries without imports
flourishing as communities start to grow (like Slovakia, Czech Republic,
Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark) but less involvement in countries
with imports. A vast empty map is no fun, but neither is a complete map.
The worst is a seemingly complete map, with crap data (like plan.at data
in Austria, that was in general off by around 20-100m).
Just show me some neighboring countries where the one with imports some
time ago (minimum 1 year) are doing better than neighboring
countries/regions where no imports took place.
I think imports are good for stuff we cannot easily record ourselves
(like borders) - but no good for stuff we can get ourselves.
And if you see tracing from aerial imagery as a chore, you're making a
mistake. I think we should wait till local people do it. That way it
gets better quality and is not much work for anyone. We should not
strive to be complete, but offer more or different data than commercial
map providers, because that's where we are good at. Striving to get a
map with best use for carnavigation will not happen - our structure and
means are really inferior here. Getting speciality maps noone can
compete with large communities.
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