Kate, The recent microtasking development you refer to is called Kuona, and was developed by IRC user PovAddict. It was not for finding water wells, but instead for finding towns in large, empty desert areas. Other than that you are correct though; I just wanted to clarify that point.
I agree that a microtasking tool for buildings attracts a different user base, but I think that is good and that is what we tried explicitly with Kuona. The idea was to make it easy for "non-osm'ers" to contribute by giving them something very easy, and completely hiding the OSM interface and data model away from them; just look at a picture, and click on the village, or click "nothing here" if you were just getting a picture of empty desert. This kind of thing could work well for tracing buildings, however for actual map editing like that you run into problems. For example, buildings should usually be orthogonal and josm/potlatch have tools to do this, but random users clicking on a microtasking tool may not understand this. Non-square buildings are as much work to "clean up" as they are to just trace from nothing, so it may not work as well as you think. This is not an unsolvable task, and I don't mean to discourage this kind of thinking, but we need to engineer the editor in such a way that the data contributed can be used. With Kuona, the user data was not put into OSM directly, but instead was just used to tell normal OSM mappers where to look to do their mapping. This kind of "hybrid" approach worked very well, since the non-OSM community could still contribute, however their contributions did not go straight into the DB but instead were passed through other OSM users with more experience and therefore a certain lack of quality was not a problem. So basically the thing that worked well was not that non-osm people were giving us data (which may be of questionable quality), but instead were making osm people work more efficiently through their efforts. Anyway, just some things to consider when working on these microtasking systems. -AndrewBuck
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