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Comment by ris | Hacker News Reader

One of the typical ways this manifests itself in reality is a dedicated local mapper adding or correcting a detail where they know that some common data sources are either wrong or out of date. At some point later a corporate mapper the other side of the planet working from imagery will come along and change it back to agree with the imagery they have, despite it being 4 years old. Local mappers get exhausted from the effort it takes to keep their patch from being broken and disenfranchised with their edits being drowned out by the noise of the corporate machine.

A devils advocate answer of course, I'm personally on the fence on the issue.

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To also play devil's advocate, that could happen with a non-corporate mapper on the other side of the world, too.

The solution, I think, would be a mandatory date field specifying when the data was accurate, and only allowing updates with more recent data.

It could happen, but it generally doesn't.

That's the kind of thing that happens when someone is paid pennies per edit and given insufficient resources to guide those edits, which really only happens when someone points a hose of money at a contractor.

I've long been a fan of a mandatory time field! Now to get Stack Overflow to implement it too :)

That, my friends, would be the first step for my dream to finally map historical data, like in the OHM, directly in the OSM without anyone feeling bothered by it.

That hasn’t been seen in practice though. Apple has been making changes from surveying with their own vehicles, not out of date imagery. Amazon makes updates from delivery drivers reporting issues making deliveries.

This specific thing has been seen in practice, it was fairly regular occurrence back when I contributed to OSM and a source of lots of similar complaints as this article at the time. In fact, often the argument was framed as automated vs human editors as some non-corporate large-scale data imports had gone badly wrong too.

Even at that time though, it seemed like the corporate support was, on balance, a positive thing. The main worry at that time (for me anyway) was some corp getting smart and pitching themselves as a middleman for other big corps. Luckily the contenders all got slurped up by big corps in a feast of mutually assured destruction, and since no one could trust their future to be built on a competitor's playground, they seem to have all defaulted to OSM.

Similar to Linux, having a diverse set of medium sized corps on your team (and maybe a few really big ones that see you as a complement, not a competitor) seems to be a winning strategy.

It's happened to me. Not just on maps, but on Wikipedia.

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