Hi Klaus,
First of all, thanks for providing such a measured response to a not very
measured message. I’m sorry you got such a rude message in the first place and
want to assure you that it doesn’t reflect HOT’s attitude, both stated by the
organization and unstated within the community, towards errors by new
contributors. Everyone has to start somewhere and errors are inevitable.
Secondly, I do have to agree with the point of the message. The fact is your
iterative work process doesn’t fit with the contribution-validation process HOT
has set up to make it easy for everyone to work together. There’s no graceful
way in the technical tools or HOT’s workflow to reflect that buildings-as-nodes
are a transitional step by you towards perfect data. Thus it creates the
potential for others to waste time “correcting” what seems like a mistake.
I can understand how this system would work really well when you’re managing a
task or area by yourself. But HOT tasks are done with others and the system is
designed so that we build on one another’s work. Also consider that no
responding agencies are looking for buildings as nodes and hence your
transitional data adds no value until entered as an area.
Finally, a gentle reminder to experienced: if you encounter systematic errors
from users, however seemingly basic or disastrous, please give them the benefit
of the doubt with a nice message. Inviting new users to contribute guarantees
mistakes, but it creates a lot more value than harm: we have to accept the
mistakes as part of the process. If I was a new user and read the message above
I guarantee I would be scared off mapping — and that means HOT just lost a
potential longtime contributor.
Best,
Robert
—
Sent from Mailbox
On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 11:14 AM, Klaus Hartl <k...@gmx.de> wrote:
> Hi HOT,
> with this message I’m not particularly answering the previous one rather than
> intending to jump on that topic due to some misunderstandings I got notified
> by concerned users via private message (which I’ll post here), on which a
> little clarification is needed. If the following issues are clarified
> elsewhere, I’d like to thank you for that notice in advance and excuse any
> double posting.
> Some OSM mapper wrote to me:
> Hi I'd like to let you know that the Task #658
> (http://tasks.hotosm.org/project/1018#task/658) is a complete mess thanks to
> you and a few other users. Why don't you read the instructions before
> starting to work on the map? You've entered thousand of buildings as nodes,
> when instruction states that buildings has to be entered as polygons and now
> someone is going to waste precious time in order to correct your errors. I
> hope this was your only mistake. I'm not going to waste any more time by
> writing to you; please, read carefully the instructions BEFORE any edit.
> Have a nice one Regards
> I’d like to post my reasons to this list so that
> it can be validated by all and
> further misunderstandings can hopefully be avoided
> Hello […],
> Thank you for your friendly notice and for honoring OSM volunteer work.
> You're definitely right proposing to trace buildings as areas.
> Hence, I am fully aware that I created information what you might consider a
> lack of quality.
> However, the reasons for registering buildings like I did are these:
> I was working on an HOT task (in case you don't know, please see [1]).
> Buildings are not part of the main objective of this task, which is rather to
> find flat spaces suitable for potential helicoper landings among others.
> Regarding my paradigm of contributing to OSM data more generally, I tend to
> improve data quality in several iterations, this means to break up the task
> into various pieces (which of course have to be consistent), if it isn't
> justifiable to solve the task as an one-off (cf. 1.). The first iteration in
> the given case would be to register buildings as quickly as possible.
> Technically spoken, in JOSM, I copy one building node and then per instance
> point the mouse cursor on the right spot while pasting. You're right when you
> call this far from perfect, but it's something me or others can start from
> later. And regarding the schema [2], attributing a single node looks fairly
> valid to me. Tracing the building as an area would therefore be part of the
> next iteration step since some exact adjustment is required per object, which
> renders the effort many times higher.
> If you've got any remarks or further questions, please don't hesitate to
> state them.
> Cheers and happy mapping
> Klaus / k127
> References:
> [1] http://tasks.hotosm.org/project/1026#task/114
> [2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:building
> Cheers
> Klaus / k127
> Am 04.05.2015 um 01:50 schrieb Brad Neuhauser <brad.neuhau...@gmail.com>:
>>
>> On Sunday, May 3, 2015, Dan S <danstowell+...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi -
>>
>> 2015-05-03 22:03 GMT+01:00 Phil Allford <pallf...@gmail.com>:
>> > 1. Should I delete the single node tag for a house when I trace a building?
>> > JOSM warns of object within object... I left the original tags.
>>
>> Yes, delete it - it's important not to lose any extra tags that might
>> be there, so make sure of that (but in many cases it's just
>> building=yes or whatever).
>>
>> Advanced JOSM users like to merge the old node into one of the new
>> building's nodes, moving the tags from node to way, so that the
>> object's history is "connected". Don't feel obliged to do that if it's
>> tricksy.
>>
>> Probably most new users aren't using Potlatch, but for anyone that is, you
>> can convert from node to area and keep all tags by selecting the node, then
>> shift-clicking where you want another corner to be.
>> _______________________________________________
>> HOT mailing list
>> HOT@openstreetmap.org
>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/hot
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