Hi, On 06/13/2014 04:57 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote: >> To sum it up: please stop treating/regarding "gardeners" differently >> from "surveyors". If a distinction is to be made (and gradual levels >> defined), it's between large and small edits. > > the most important distinction I see is the one between edits in an area > you know and those in an area you don't know.
Absolutely. "Gardening" in your own backyard is perfectly fine; and I'd even go so far as to extend this term of "own backyard" to subject matter instead of just locality - if you are an expert on power stations then you might indeed be able to better map a power station on the other side of the globe than the person who is local but not an expert on power stations. "Gardening" in someone else's backyard is not forbidden but in my eyes it is certainly a less valuable activity than mapping or "gardening" in an area where you have knowledge, and I will certainly not treat the German mapper who armchair-maps Peru with the same regard as I will treat the Peruvian mapper who surveys his home area EVEN IF the armchair mapper should, for the time being, deliver better quality because he has clocked up 2000 hours of armchair mapping experience. I myself have traced thousands of features from aerial imagery in places I've never been to. It's a recreational activity that I occasionally do for fun, and a guilty pleasure because deep down I know that the spirit of OSM is to let the people who live there do the work. I would certainly never claim that my work in these remote areas should be treated the same as that of a proper surveyor; in fact if surveyors on the ground should decide that I traced a heap of rubbish I would be happy for them to remove it and start anew. I consider "made by people who know the area" one of the strongest selling points of OSM. I am fully aware that this is not true for all our data, and partly that's down to us not yet being big enough to have enough people in every area, but in the long run I would be very happy to see "gardening"/mapping/tracing/... in unfamiliar areas disappear altogether. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
