Bryan, On 07/25/2018 09:40 PM, Bryan Housel wrote: > That said - Frederik’s message made me really angry. I’m still pretty upset > about it. To your analogy, I’d never go on talk-de and threaten to revert > the work of some students in Germany just because they didn’t connect some > lines.
What made me angry when I saw the edits was not that they were buggy - anyone starts out making buggy edits and I still make them to this day. And there's no difference between bumbling US newbies and bumbling German newbies or anywhere else in the world. What pisses me off is when bumbling newbiedom goes hand in hand with bigmouthed web sites about how the so-and-so project is making the world a better place, and then I look at what the project with the cool "store front" actually does in OSM and see rubbish. This is not the work of a student who has just discovered OSM and is taking their first steps. This is the work of a student who has signed up for a project, and been instructed by someone who is ultimately part of the group that makes the cool public-facing web site about OpenSidewalks. And what I see in OSM is not something that is suitable to achieve the project goals. It should be in the project's own interest to avoid or repair this. So my impression is, there's a project here that has invested a significant part of their time into convincing third parties that they're doing a great thing (maybe even convincing third parties that they're worth funding), but they treat OSM with much less diligence than they spend on their store front. In the end, it seems to be "good enough" to have students add disjunct lines that are unlikely to ever achieve any of the goals OpenSidewalks claims to pursue. If OSM was anything valuable to them, anything worth caring for, and not just a vehicle to piggyback their project on, then they would provide better training and supervision to their students so that mistakes like the ones I randomly stumbled across either do not happen, or are corrected. This is nothing to do with US mappers in general, I only posted here because it happens to be a US location. Similar things happen everywhere (even though some cultures seem more prone to do big PR than others). It is not even about mappers at all, because it is much more likely that those enlisting, instructing, and supervising the student are at fault here than that the student received excellent instructions and just wasn't up to it. I have no clue what the student(s) have been instructed to do, but whatever the goal is, the activity we see performed here is very unlikely to help achieve it. Those who set this up are responsible for fixing it; they can't just set up a half-baked project and then hope that OSM is somehow going to fix it. I am absolutely hostile towards projects treating OSM like an ever-forgiving receptacle into which you can pour anything half-baked and "the others" are somehow magically going to make it right. This is a deeply disrespectful attitude towards all those who are already spending lots of time building OSM. And if the occasional threat of reverting the whole lot is required to nudge the people managing such projects towards more diligence then that's a good thing for all of OSM! Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
