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> But they are contributing back Sometimes they are not contributing. There have been complaints about contractors employed by the big firms adding non-existen
by Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> But they are contributing back
Sometimes they are not contributing. There have been complaints about contractors employed by the big firms adding non-existent roads, tagging roads wrongly, etc. The concern is that because the big firms are so big and now have power over OSM governance, they can simply ignore all those community members who are noticing their persistent mistakes and asking them to stop.
- warkdarrior 6y agoThis seems to imply that the corporate members are inserting these mistakes on purpose. I am not convinced this is the case, as I do not see how they could benefit from creating bad maps.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoIt is not that they are inserting the mistakes on purpose, but rather the contractors actually doing the edits are not responding to changeset comments saying "Hey, you've been persistently making a tagging error with regard to X, could you please stop?" The big corporate members are so big and powerful, they don't care if their contractors are sometimes violating OSM etiquette and failing to work together with other members of the community.
- lupire 6y agoCan bad mappers be banned? Or is the net value positive even if theyale some errors?
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoIf you ban the account of one employee of a contractor, that employee can just make a new account, or the contractor company can give that employee another account to edit from.
- ledauphin 6y agobut this is trivially true of all contributing accounts to OSM, right?
- mpol 6y agoBut this time someone's salary depends on it, it is not just fly-by vanadlism for fun. They will be more persistent in staying active as mapper.
- jfoster 6y agoRather than continually getting their accounts banned, wouldn't it be easier for them to eventually start responding to the OSM etiquette?
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoIt is presumed that sometimes they don’t respond to changeset comments because they aren’t proficient in English (or the local language of whatever country they are mapping remotely).
- Qwertious 6y agoWhy assume that? Maybe there's a bug in their internal software, and it's cheaper to create a program that checks if you're banned and automatically creates a new account, than it is to fix their internal problem.
- yorwba 6y agoHobbyists who keep getting their changes reverted and their account banned will eventually give up, especially if they're not actively trying to harm the project. But a contractor who's paid for their work, even if it's not very good? They'll just keep going so they don't lose their job.
- amadvance 6y ago