In my locality someone has started adding this type of information:
Short traces from the road/street to the house indicating where the ‘driveway’ runs and the entrance.
Lines indicating hedges (?) or boundaries between properties.
In the case of the driveways, the author has indicated where he/she thinks the driveway runs on the property. This is basically a guess as many properties have an AREA of driveway, not just a ‘straight line’.
In the case of the hedge lines, the work is not done with (in my opinion) sufficient accuracy to be of value: either the line is in the right place or it is not.
I can see that there are times when an indication of an entrance would be of value, but most of the local changes I see fall into the 'obvious’category.
So I have a number of concerns about adding all this data:
a) it’s not correct to start with
b) if this was done for the whole country/world, a huge amount of additional data would be generated.
We (openstreetmap contributors) need to be aware of the total size of the dataset and implications that has down the line for many, many users.
Hi,
regarding a), if the information added is not accurate or correctly placed, it can be improved. If it is wrong it should be deleted. In the cases you mentioned, it doesn’t seem wrong.
Regarding b), I think it is a false problem. Is OSM giving priority to some type of information, rather than other types? We shouldn’t mandate what is relevant or not. The OSM database is become bigger and bigger anyway, and this is good, because it means that more information is mapped and made available to the whole world. We have to adapt to this and scale up the infrastructure accordingly.
The more data the better so long as it’s accurate… OSM Data is able to be used nowadays for designers to create virtual towns and cities, so the more high detailed accurate data the better in my opinion.
What annoys me is when one puts hours and hours into putting accurate data into OSM only to come back a month later and much of it has been deleted by some idiot who replaces it with very basic data, often inaccurate too!!
I for one won’t be continuing to contribute to editing data into maps for OSM until there is some kind of control when people come in and delete data without proper justification except for the fact that they are pissed-off that someone is adding highly accurate data into OSM.
Also, I’m sure many take NO NOTICE of the utility that tells them if there are problems or issues with the work they do. Much of the data someone replaced my data with is absolutely full of issues and problems…
One solution for this kind of idiocy would be not to allow them to save their work until all issues were solved for the work they have done; this way it would stop these idiots deleting and editing good work for bad, and this would surely be simple to do too, and also this would lead to good work throughout the OSM database.
I’m not familiar with the process of finding the member who has altered any work I have done, and besides, once work has been deleted and replaced what would the point be apart from asking them why they replaced the work that was already done at that point on the map? Nothing would be achieved accept bad feeling.
While OSM is a free for all without any qualification as to their ability to edit the maps then this situation will always be happening.
Like I said: A good way to stop them would be NOT to allow them to save any work done if there are still issues in their work highlighted by the Issues Utility in the editor, that would stop these people in their tracks.
This would not be practical. I mainly update roads from a national road database. During this work I find lot of errors/warnings, not related to the road updates. I’m not interested in fixing these other problems. So I upload when my road update is done, even if there are other issues remaining.
Yes, it can be tricky to find out how the data was changed and by which mapper, esp. if an object is no longer shown.
BUT: Your data is not deleted. It would be restored if others agree that it was better. So, if you recognize vandalism you can ask for help in this forum. Something like “I’ve mapped lots of buildings in this area and now they are gone.Why?” with a link to the area would be enough.
And as well as the possibility of reverting “bad” changesets, it may be useful to understand why they happened: pure vandalism, new user not understanding what should be done, paid mappers systematically following poor instructions, mappers using out of date imagery, genuine difference of opinion about how things should be mapped, maybe an error in your own mapping that is not flagged by automated checks and you weren’t aware of.
