Please, let's tone down the rhetoric here - both of you! Frederik has a long and distinguished history with OSM. He cares about the map passionately. He wants very much to see things done right. Alas, that tends to mean that he forgets at times what it means to be a novice, and expects perfection in mapping from the beginning. He works in a part of the world that has a vibrant map community, with experienced locals almost everywhere to guide the way, which means that he actually gets near-perfection from the novices - because there is a generous supply of experienced mentors. For that reason, the Europeans, and the Germans in particular, seem to have trouble grasping the specific problems that we Americans face - land that is incomprehensibly vast to many from Europe, and far too few mappers to cover it.
On the other hand, we Americans inhabit a culture of ad-hoc expedients and sloppiness - and pay for it in the map, with broken routing, broken rendering, and so on. We get in data that are 'just barely good enough' - and tend to abandon them to degrade into 'not even good enough' as the next urgent project beckons, of places where there are no usable data at all. Or go off to our other communities - after all, we all have lives beyond the map. (I understand that mapping is also what Frederik does for a living. I don't.) This leaves our map in disarray, and it's easy for someone to want to throw up his hands and rip out big stretches of it. I'm sure that I'm guilty both ways. I've no doubt field-mapped stuff very badly when I was learning, and I've no doubt missed going back to fix things. (I at least hope that I've left matters better than I've found them!) I've also been guilty, most likely, of damaging the community - by importing. I still do it - but in my defense, all of my imports are nearly poster children for "data not feasible for amateur mappers to survey in the field." (Frederik has argued stongly to me that this is a synonym for "data that mappers care too little about to deserve inclusion in OSM." I remain unconvinced.) I do try to tidy up after myself when people leave notes or changelog comments! I don't believe that I've ever had a change, no matter how large, reverted wholesale. I do see that some of the Austin sidewalk data appear to be of pretty questionable quality. I don't know to what extent the project has mapped elsewhere, or how far the problem extends. Has anyone tried to reach out to the mappers in question? Or - presuming that this was a student group - tried to find their faculty advisor? Does the web site give contact information for a project leader? Are members of the DWG other than Frederik aware of the issue? Reverting the changes should surely be the last resort, not the first, and glibly tossing off, "at least they've labeled everything with the project, so we can delete it when they fail," is no way to recruit mappers! (Recruiting mappers should probably be American mappers' highest priority - we have so few!) On the occasions where the mappers and leadership are unreachable, it always should have the tone, "unfortunately, the original mapper in not answering communications, and there is a lack of resources to field-map the questionable features, so reversion seems to be unavoidable." The glib dismissal is particularly unseemly when it can be misinterpreted as an official pronouncement of the DWG, of which Frederik is a member. Compounding the problem by nationalistic labelling of this as "yet another German attempt to bully US mappers" serves nobody. Yes, I know that Americans and Germans do engage in Kulturkampf over OSM management. I'm frustrated by both the US "we'll fix it later" attitude, by some statements from the other side of the Atlantic that seem to say, "our model is fine; if you have cases that don't fit, fix your country!" But always keep examining cultural assumptions. We come from places that have different needs. Sometimes we Americans are horribly slipshod simply because we can't manage better. Sometimes the Europeans are horribly meticulous because they are trying to address problems that are entirely beyond what we Americans can dream of reaching. (Wheelchair routing? I'm still trying to get rural roads to within a few hundred metres of their actual locations, and get government and community facilities on the map in the first place. You have to crawl before you can run.) Let's get the data - and more important, the process - fixed, rather than falling to fighting among ourselves. Fix the immediate problem. Educate the mappers. Keep exhorting Americans to improve their mapping standard. Keep cautioning Europeans not to expect too much - we have a big country and too few people to map it. And keep trying to map the world! _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
