The damage done by the "foot shot" is the damage to the community. At least one researcher found a way to study this (because of inadvertent import quality issues with TIGER) and found that the areas with better import quality wound up more poorly mapped over time. I'm convinced that there are several confounding effects in play here, so I don't take the results as more than a strong caution.
It doesn't stop me from importing, but it holds me back from a number of things. I have a number of state and local databases available with hydrography, transportation networks, recreational trails, and so on, that I use as sources for "what's missing from the map" but would now never contemplate importing wholesale. (Once in a while, if they're substantially correct, I'll copy-and-paste an object or two - lawfully.) I confine my imports to things such as the boundaries of large parks and wilderness areas that are of public interest but infeasible to field map. Even the agencies that run them grapple with ancient inaccurate surveys. I will confess that I, too, have been remiss in picking up after the TIGER. My mapping concentrates on where I go: my own neighbourhood, and less-popular recreational destinations for which no good maps (public or commercial) exist at all.I might have done more about the highway network if TIGER weren't "almost but not quite good enough", so I may personally be an example of the damage that particular import has done to the community. I have few if any qualms about doing a quick copy-and-paste of something like a pond outline from a public source if a manual review confirms that it's correct. That's a shortcut around the tedium of tracing around orthophotos, and I can't see that doing it on a scale of individual features does any real harm - it's just a labor-saving technique. and likely to give better results than tracing with my hand tremor. And now I'm going back to curating data - doing the necessary conflation to reimport updated protected area polygons from New York State - demonstrating that imported data don't have to be 'dead'. _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
