Why does "imports" mean "not crowdsourced," if the crowd determines which imports are source-able?
Why doesn't public-domain data that the crowd has funded count as crowdsourced? No one has been able to provide directly observable & verifiable information about Ptolemy, yet there is still a Wikipedia page about him. My concern about this entire discussion is that the whole import vs community argument is employed even when there is a community behind an import. On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 3:21 AM, Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> wrote: > Hi, > > > On 31.12.2012 06:49, Steve Coast wrote: > >> Therefore I don't see why each >> country or state (i.e. Mass. and their own imports) can't have it's >> own solution which reflects the cultural realities there. >> > > Your argument seems to be, essentially, that the cultural reality "there" > is that they have no need for a crowdsourced map. If that is so, then maybe > we should just accept that, and move on to places where there is such a > need? > > When you say that "Waze has not failed", I wouldn't know - Waze has zero > publicity where I live, and their website offers a choice of "United States > - Italy - Spain - Israel - Rest of world". It may be a big thing in the > States but over here it usually doesn't even get a mention when people are > talking about map data. > > You're also talking of "ten or twenty" crowd-sourced maps of the world, > and making it sound like a threat to OSM. > > The real threat to OSM is to rely on imported data. If 99.9% of data in > the US comes from imported sources, then those "ten or twenty" other > crowd-sourced maps can simply import the same, and boast: "Our map has only > 0.1% less than OpenStreetMap, and we're growing!" > > You say that most users don't care where their data comes from, they just > use whatever is in the package. Which also means that user adoption of OSM > is worth little; if there's OSM on the iPhone today, there might be OtherSM > (which offers 99.9% of the data that OSM has plus more favourable licensing > terms) on the iPhone tomorrow and there goes your user base. > > Any advantage we want to have over the competition that you paint on the > wall can only come through a large community that cares for our data, a > community committed to OSM, doing work that cannot be easily replaced by 50 > programmers from some outsourcing company. > > In one sentence of your long post you mention the hope that imports could > actually enlarge the community: > > > If we could hand wave a "yes" it would change a lot of >> things and create positive feedback in more people resources to fix >> the map. >> > > I've heard that quite often. "If only we import just a little more, then > our map will suddenly cross some usability threshold and we'll have more > users contributing quality data than we can wish for". > > I guess it's a matter of faith. I can't prove you wrong but there's no > evidence to support that hope either. > > > Anyway. Maybe I'm completely wrong. >> > > Your lament about us having "given up on the output side" is worth > discussing calmly, at another time, in another thread. It rests on the same > assumption that more users means more mappers, and I don't like the > wording, but it might not be *entirely* wrong. The question is, however, if > the means we have available would allow us to "not give up on the output > side", or if trying to acquire the necessary means would make us give up on > something else. > > > Bye > Frederik > > -- > Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" > > ______________________________**_________________ > Talk-us mailing list > Talk-us@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.**org/listinfo/talk-us<http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us> > -- Jeff Meyer Global World History Atlas www.gwhat.org j...@gwhat.org 206-676-2347
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