Hi! There is a considerable difference between an import into a mostly empty area - which is rather easy to achieve and mostly helpful - and an import into an already basically mapped area, which is hard to integrate and where existing data may be damaged. I believe that this should not happen, existing survey results should always have precendence over arial imagery or imported data. I believe that that a proper integration into existing data is hard to achieve, therefore it should not be done by beginners and it should be coordinated.
There appears to be a common misconception that arial imagery and imported data is somehow "better by default" than the hand-drawn traces. Imports should not duplicate existing data and should not overwrite it. Badly executed imports can cripple the whole data in an area, replace current information by obsolete data and badly tagged imports can mess up whole tagging schemes by suddenly pushing the bad tagging as the majority use. To make a long story short, I believe that imports should be restricted or checked very tightly, except for "first" imports into a mostly empty area. When it comes to motivation, I was very happy to find that my chief area of interest was mostly empty, with just one major road and the motorway. This appealed to my sense as an "explorer" who could make a visible difference to the map. I happily spent a few weekends driving around and mapping all the secondary roads. When it became available, I appreciated arial imagery as a help to trace rivers and forests, which are hard to grasp otherwise, but stopped using it for roads and paths as in later surveys I found that the impression about the nature of the way derived from the picture was frequently wrong. A year later the map was mostly complete and it got boring. So I mapped the routes that I came along anyway, but I did no longer feel like going out of my way to map a neighboring area - it was already there, it was usable - why bother? So, personally, I believe that drawing the first roads on an empty map is much more fun and motivation than fixing mistakes in someone else's imported data. If the actuality, accuracy and quality of data is less than excellent, I would rather not import it at all. Motivated mappers can do better. bye Nop -- View this message in context: http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/Zero-tolerance-on-imports-tp6044534p6048406.html Sent from the General Discussion mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk