I just read through the diary entry: “So how does the Facebook’s AI Assisted Road Import Process work?”
I must say, that methodology, while obviously not perfect, is still very impressive. I’m going to risk getting criticism from the dedicated mappers who have worked in Thailand for years and say that I think the FB team has made a huge contribution to our Thailand map. Yes, there have been problems and those will no doubt continue but overall they’ve added data that would have taken us years to do without their help. I have often passed over adding residentials to small towns just for lack of time and because there were always more important things to map. FB has added many, many uninteresting, boring-to-map sois to those towns. I wish there was a way to get them interested in mapping geographic features and aligning miserable PGS coastlines in Alaska!
My advice is to accept the fact that making mistakes is part of the learning process and to appreciate what Facebook has contributed to the overall project. You can all remember when the only satellite imagery we had was Bing’s. Because of FB’s deep pockets, we now we have several excellent overlays, some of which are so good that, with my experience with camping and fishing in Alaska, I can practically transport myself to the location.
Today I came across a node I had added to OSM in Alaska four years ago. I had named it and made a note but had forgotten to say what it was! Amenity, attraction, landuse? I would not make that same mistake today. FB mappers are paid to do a job. Some of those employees will rise to the occasion and do good work, others won’t — to those latter people, it’s just a job. But I’m in favor of following the old adage, “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.” To my mind, mass reverting all their edits would be doing just that. There’s definitely some bad stuff they added but there’s also an awful lot of good.
Cheers,
Dave