On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 12:13 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer <[email protected]> wrote:
> not sure about this, but I definitely support the decision, because it > was a real problem in the past when imports could not easily be > distinguished from individual and original contributions. Excepted that in the mentionned case, the French cadastre building footprints import is localized (scale is a municipality, a town or a village) and the features are limited to buldings and possibly waterways. All imported elements are also sourced and uploads are limited to one or few changesets. So the problem to distinguish individual and original contribution does not exist here. The problem is that the guideline is writing for mass imports which is not always the case for all imports. Here in France, we also import administrative boundaries from the same source. It is done carefully and manually since years now. The task is so huge (36.0000 municipality boundaries at the end) that we crowdsource it. We also have a tool to monitor such data (osmose). We cannot ask each contributor to create a special account each time he is importing something into OSM which is not coming from Bing or its GPS. And if creating a new user account would be that easy, but it requires a special, different email account each time for each new account (excepted for those who are old enough in OSM and created tens of accounts before this restriction was in place). Only this point is creating a barrier to import any thing in general into OSM (which is, I suspect, the real target of the DWG at the end). What I would like to know here is if the DWG is allowed to block one contributor just because he is not following one of the requirements writen on the wiki guidelines, a requirement which was just an option few months ago. The DWG is claiming that the import guideline is writen by the community. But how many people have been involved in the discussion deciding to change the wiki and make a separate account a "must" instead of a recommendation ? And where was it discussed ? If 5 people decided to make it an obligation, can 5 other people decide to change the wiki back to an option ? I agree with the concept of seperate accounts but only for large imports done by a single person in a short time. All the opposite of the small French cadastre imports done by the crowd since years on limited areas. The guideline contains other recommendations which are also requested to our importers (like "integrate with the existing data). We also wrote our own guideline to avoid bad, unprepared, blind imports. Unfortunatelly, we also have some "black sheeps" not following it. In this case, the French community is big and mature enough to contact the persons, repair and revert them or even ask the DWG to block one person until he reads our messages. But this was not the case for the mentionned person. For all of these reasons, I would like to modify the import guidelines and make the separate account back to a recommendation which is not alsways necessary, especially in case of limited imports, in size and/or features. Pieren _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
