in short, i don’t think all imports are the problem – just badly thought-through, automated, mass imports. we should be very careful in selecting the data which is good enough to import and make sure that all of it is thoroughly checked by a real user before it is committed into the database. otherwise we risk slowing community growth and putting off potential users.

In short, I don’t think imports are the problem, but our lack of ideas so far about how to make mapping fun when the map goes 1.0.

I wonder if any real data can be found to support the simulation? It seems like a lot of work, but perhaps selecting a few hundred US counties, then extracting history data, before and after the TIGER import in the area will advise us on improvements for the simulation.

Still, that only addresses community effects when the import is TIGER-like, but it is a start.

There were mappers in USA before TIGER, but perhaps not a statistically significant community.

Perhaps Netherlands data around the AND import is helpful. Data from the current French Corine import, may help in future.

But maybe those two mindsets are quite different in fact. I think people judge our maps on two different metrics: “Coverage” and “Quality”. For using OSM, coverage is very important and quality is quite important (depends on the usage, but in general people perhaps decide they can’t use our data if they see variable coverage) BUT for piquing somebody’s curiosity and getting them involved in mapping, they’re interested in great examples of beautifully mapped areas, but also inspired when they see areas with poor coverage. What they are not inspired by, is completely uniform full coverage of a poor quality.