To further clarify my statement: By "outsiders" (or non-osmers) what I meant was people who do not edit (or only edit a few times) and are therefore not experienced contibutors. They can be useful and can provide a lot of good info, but I think it is better to have them "guide" our mappers like they did spotting villages with Kuona (to be hand traced by experienced OSMers later) than in trying to directly add map data. Even buffering the map data and then importing by mappers later has issues in that as I said, often cleaning up bad data is harder than just making it right in the first place. So this was my concern. I don't object to the idea in priniciple of non-osmers contributing data (after all that's how we all started) but we need to think not just of how to get actual map data from them, but also other ways they can help the project in more indirect ways.
Regarding automatically squaring up buildings: Yes this kind of thing could be done by the tool, and that would solve most of the problems, so that could be a solution. But my point as above was that this is only one possible way for them to contribute. They could likely be more useful to the OSM community by thinking of other kinds of things for them to do. Tracing buildings seems like a very simple task at first, but when you get down to the details it can be farily complicated and there is a lot to get wrong. :) But I like the idea in general that is being discussed here, I just want to avoid common pitfalls that we have experienced in the past, and share what we have found to work very well on Kuona, and what we can learn from that. -AndrewBuck
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