Peter Wendorff wrote: >> The first is "creation" and you see immediately the >> effect on the rendered maps, the second is "maintenance" and is much >> less funny. That's two different types of contributions and two >> different public. >> > The problem exists - of course, and yet it is visible mainly at bit > imports, > but in future we will have changing mappers: People stop mapping, new > generations of mappers start. > For these people we need motivation strategies to check, update and > optimize data already mapped. > Same thing is with imports, but I think, that's only the first part of > the problem obvious now.
If *all* experienced mappers in an area disappeared at once, that would be comparable to an import. That's unlikely, though. With a healthy community, *some* mappers might leave, but a new mapper will still find others who are already familiar with the data in the area and who can offer support. Maybe the mapper will even have been recruited through a community event in the first place. With an large-scale import, however, the amount and complexity of data can easily be far ahead of what the local community is ready for. A new mapper will face a large amount of data, with no experienced mappers around who have worked with that data before. To summarize this: * empty area => no one to help you, but low complexity and no maintenance tasks * community-mapped area => high complexity, maintenance required, but strong community support * imported area => high complexity, maintenance, AND no one to help/motivate you Some of the challenges of dealing with existing data are similar, no matter whether they were created by mappers or a bot. The combination of existing data with the lack of a healthy local community is mostly unique to imports. Tobias Knerr _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
