On 21.02.2011 19:18, Peter Budny wrote: > Let me try to elaborate as concisely as possible. > > OSM right now has very little tools to support editing.
Without imports, data creation is performed by the same community, and with the same tools, as the editing and maintenance that follow data creation. It is therefore likely that the speed and direction of the database's development will correspond to community growth and tool improvements, and will never be overwhelming. With imports, this isn't guaranteed. It is unfortunately very easy to move too fast or in the wrong direction with imports, because you are not using the same tools that you will have to use when you want to improve the data with local knowledge, or update it when reality changes. Manual edits are the most important class of contributions to OSM. But manual edits are performed with a different set of tools than imports, and by different people. So we need to make sure that our imports do not create data that cannot (due to amount or complexity) be handled easily by existing local communities with the available tools for manual editing. The best way to achieve this, IMO, is to only execute mass edits and imports in collaboration with a local community. This makes sure that there is a sufficiently developed community of mappers "on the ground", allows them to evaluate the data's quality beforehand, and makes it likely that the data will be well integrated into the OSM database soon after the import. Tobias Knerr _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
