On 09/19/2012 10:55 PM, Richard Weait wrote: > [1] Of course, I don't mean you personally, Jean-Marc. I have no idea > of your OSM screen name, if you are a Cadastre importer or if you use > an import account. I mean those who have been knowingly ignoring the > import guidelines. I was not integrating Cadastre data, until a couple of days ago when I did a couple of villages just to make sure that I understand the problem well enough and confirm that it does take manual work to do it right.
One of the possible outcomes of the current debates is that the current rules are just fine as they are. But even if things turn out that way, the occurrence of this debate shows that not everyone was convinced. That is why I offered to clarify the consensual reasons for the rules, so that the rules become evident to all - including the current skeptics; or that they are modified to fit those consensual reasons. In your message, you explain in detail the profile of some of the dissenting editors and some of the explanations given by those who just find the rules inconvenient. Indeed some of the dissent is antisocial and must be controlled, and most of the inconvenience explanations can be addressed technically. But that still does not make clear for everyone the reasons for those rules. Many people on this list have been collaborating for long enough to have mutually adjusted and internalized a set of implicit values that represent OSM culture. But that culture is not entirely homogeneous, especially since linguistic barriers weaken the links with large clumps of users. So we need debate, to resolve the differences or find that there are no differences after all. We cannot do that with implicit values : we have to make them explicit. Today the rules are explicit, but not the reasons that underlie them. Expliciting can be tedious and provoke annoying nitpicking, but I fear that dissent will recur as long as the dissenters don't feel that they have been made part of an inclusive process that grounds the rules in mutually agreed values. So let's enumerate the whys of the hows. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
