Peter Budny schrieb:
The thing is, whether the work is done by humans or robots, how are you going to know if it's right?
Now here's the actual argument why automated imports are often a bad thing: A lot of data is being added to the database *without being checked by anyone* for its quality. You might have seen the Example of plan.at in Austria in this thread, we had and have significant problems with the data imported from there because some of it is very bad quality and has been automatically connected with ways from existing surveyed and checked data, so often you can't even easily delete the wrong data again without doing harm.
The most important reason why we need actual people to do work on the data is because they can check the quality by e.g. going there themselves, looking at multiple satellite images, etc. - of course including one of the most important items where OSM wins against a lot of other map material: local knowledge of the editors.
Robert Kaiser _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
