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by Paul-ish 2039 days ago
There's still low hanging fruit in OSM. There are still areas with official government GIS data that hasn't been imported to OSM. For example Irvine County in CA. I wanted to try it but I don't have the GIS skills. It would be nice if someone created a tutorial to teach the bare minimum GIS skills to do an import that is up to OSM standards. Importing whole counties would be a huge boost.
1 comments

Skills are not a real barrier. Data quality and license are. When you look at official datasets, you find ways to screw up you never thought were possible

People in USA still complain about the botched TIGER import [1].

It may sound flippant, but I'd rather not have such end-to-end tutorial geared towards imports be made. It'd lower the barrier too much. People who self-taught GIS (it's possible) can be trusted to be marginally more responsible (not fully, though).

[1] TL;DR the OSM road networks in USA was initially imported from TIGER dataset. However the importing mappers didn't know TIGER was being updated, state by state. Hence, the quality of imported data is not great in many places.