Hi Jeff,
Thank you for the feedback. There are several points that need addressing here:
In the areas where I have looked most of that appears to be private driveways and farm tracks mapped as residential or unclassified. At the very least anything shorter than about 400 m should be either reverted or marked as track. I was a passenger on these roads yesterday and observing my GPS about every other road we drove past didn’t exist. There is no way I can flag or correct all of them. Heck, even as a passenger I cannot set waypoints fast enough.
Roads should never be deleted by armchair mappers, no matter what you see in aerial images. Anything that has a source tag should only be deleted or modified after verification on the ground. I think that is common sense.
We need to remember that what we do in this project has a real-life impact on the people who want to use these maps. It can make the difference between getting to your destination efficiently, or having your day spoilt. OSM in the Thai countryside used to be far more accurate than Google Maps or even ESRI’s GPS maps you have to pay for. I am no longer confident that this is still the case.
I have no idea what your project has done to OSM in other countries. For Thailand I would say: revert all changes and start over, with functioning QA. Then perhaps we could persuade some of the old hands who have left in disgust to come back.
For me this is crunch time. I was pissed off when a while back OSM legal beagles had them delete a large chunk of data, just to change the licence. I got over that and moved on. This is far more serious. The overall quality of the map data is in question. I’m sitting on 2 years’ worth of tracks from Captain Slash that I was meaning to map. I’m holding back on this for now and if it doesn’t get resolved satisfactorily I, too, will vote with my keyboard.
Kind regards,
Peter.