Generally, I am still opposed to a bot. There is a substantial body of
evidence that automated imports damage the ability to recruit and nuture
new mappers. Recent posts about Latvia, Austria and The Netherlands on
talk all substantiate this: in many cases the people recognising the
issue were those who either carried out the import or agreed to it.
I think a completion bot is a distraction from a much more important issue.
In order to get a better level of completeness in the UK what we need
are more mappers. There are several ways to recruit mappers: they
require a decent amount of hard work, and probably a broader range of
skills than writing a bot. We need a more organised way of generating
publicity on a regular basis both for national and local media. We need
a better press kit. We need to move the emphasis of mapping from getting
GPS tracks: dont get me wrong this is still valuable, but a local mapper
without a GPS can do a fine job with Bing, OS OpenData, Walking Papers,
a camera, and ground surveys. We need more outreach techniques: not just
mapping parties, or pub meets or mini-mapping, but workshops for people
interested in consuming data, workshops to review the data from
particular usage perspectives (cyclists, walkers, sustainable living,
wheelchair users, etc.). We could do with more supporting materials for
such things: slideshows, posters, how to organise .... I'm finding this
ain't that easy, but at least I'm trying.
We also need to recognise that the more detailed each area becomes the
harder it becomes for a new mapper to feel that they can contribute, not
forgetting the "I might break something". If we are to devote effort to
code its better directed at tools which can make the life of new mappers
easier: this obviously includes contributing to existing editors, but it
may mean creating new ones. It almost certainly means working to get a
much more sophisticated OpenStreetBugs integrated into the rails port:
many new mappers will initially be happy to point out bugs (see recent
examples on OSM Help where the first thing someone wants to fix is a
turn restriction).
I strongly dislike the meme "OS data is always more accurate than OSM",
because it implies there's no point in doing surveys anyway. Yes, errors
occur, although mainly in transcription rather than in surveying as can
be seen by errors in using OSSV & OSL, but tools like ITO OSM Analysis
and OSL Musical Chairs really help to pick up these errors: I've been
able to go back to pictures and audio recordings and indeed verify that
I'd not changed Street to Road when I copied the tag over from another
way. There is also the spurious accuracy problem: people filling in a
road name from OS Locator when there is *NO *evidence on the ground that
the road has that name (pace RichardF in W Oxon): see my blog post on
Kenyon Road
<http://sk53-osm.blogspot.com/2011/02/mysterious-case-of-kenyon-road.html>.
Many of the unnamed roads in the immediate vicinity of where I'm writing
this are of that type: sometimes dogged persistence can nail down that
the road is still called that, for instance from address information.
Take a look at Corby <http://osm.org/go/eu7EEN9>: its OSL road complete:
a small part on the N edge was surveyed, the rest is largely from OSSV.
There is a huge amount of information missing: footways, paths in parks,
information about Places of Worship, other POIs. Corby is the classic
sort of place which is less likely to receive attention from OSMers
according to Muki's studies: its out of the way, it lacks a strong
middle-class demographic. There are plenty of people living in places
like this who are using Skobbler's apps, but we're never going to reach
out to them if we do the easy bits from our armchairs and leave the
harder less rewarding mapping activities for others.
Why not build a separate database & render which merges the missing
names (& roads) from OSSV/OSL and OSM data, but is external to the OSM
planet database. This could use many of the same techniques as a bot.
A bot is putting short-term gain ahead of our long-term interests.
Regards,
Jerry
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