A well written piece. Well done!

I had an issue with the original causal link. There are other, more benign reasons why wealthier neighborhoods would have better OSM coverage than poorer neighborhoods. The most obvious comes from post [Maxims for Maximally Effective Mappers(https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/AntiCompositeNumber/diary/394620) which was posted immediately after this post. And I quote:

“2. Map only what you know.”

Mapping on OSM requires a certain amount of leisure time. In general, the poorer the individual, the more time they spend just making enough money to live on and the less time they have for leisure activities. Additionally, the poorer the individual, the less money they have for traveling to other places.

So I’d imagine that the individuals living in poorer neighborhoods don’t have as much time to map their own neighborhoods as wealthier individuals. And that once a neighborhood is completely mapped, the wealthier individuals will be traveling to other places to gather data more than the poorer individuals.

This could also explain why wealthier areas would have better coverage than poorer areas. Bias and opportunity are not the same thing.

@FredrikC That maxim cannot possibly contain the motivations of every mapper who has mapped Dublin. People move around the city of Dublin everyday, they have several areas that they will know just as well as what is immediately around them.

The problem with the “findings” of the blogger were that once we examine at the volume of contributed geometry we found the deprived areas doing significantly better - see the results of the extracts above. The only thing there is less of in the deprived areas is tagging depth, which like your point may require opportunity, knowledge, community support and I would agree that there is likely to be a big gap there.

Having said all this, there are huge gaps all over Dublin, all sorts of areas are not mapped out to completion with landuses and buildings. We simply don’t have enough people mapping, or at least not enough yet to be able to make solid pronouncements like that blog.

I think access to technology and education may be barriers. While basic mapping on OSM may not be difficult, it will be difficult to some who have, e.g. literacy difficulties or don’t know how to tell one type of building from another. And while many will have smart phones, mapping is easier on a computer with a full-sized keyboard and screen.

Another factor will be the number of Points of Interest (POIs) in an area. In suburban areas, there are simply fewer POIs in deprived residential areas than in affluent residential areas. That’s a problem with society, not OSM.

I tend to map what: * I know about and/or have an interest in technically, e.g. power network, speed limits, bus networks. * I know about and/or have an interest in geographically, i.e. where I live and visit. * I am capable of mapping. I don’t know how to map most types of relations. Mapping houses in housing estates bores me.

I’m not convinced by your quick conclusion. Apparently, object density is about 1.7 times as high in deprived areas and tagging depth is 3.5 times as high in more affluent areas. However, instead of investigating further, you brush away the higher tagging depth with a few sentences and decide that object density is the marker for mapping quality. Could it not also be possible that deprived areas have higher object density because they are simply more densely populated? In that case, the higher density of OSM objects would be due to a higher density of real features. Without trying to take that into account, the raw number of object density isn’t worth much. I’m not saying that the original assertion that wealthy neighbourhoods are mapped better is true, I don’t know that. But your analysis alone can not disprove it.

Thanks for doing this research. The result is a surprize because most ideas about the volunteered mapping would say poorer places are less able to map, but you do show how the poor places are more full of the buildings. When I started mapping my area was already mapped and I started on doing road side trees two miles from home :) …. my point that you shouldnt assume OS mappers only map what is beside them. Poor parts of Dublin have less points to map in my opinion. There are definitely less trees and less lighting, and somebody described it as society’s problem and it is.

@VictorIE I absolutely agree - I think that people from deprived neighbourhoods will not have the same opportunities, but my diary post wasn’t about that. I think there is a role for organisations that have access to such communities to ask experienced mappers to visit them. The fewer level 3 tags is also related to the low numbers of POI opportunities. I agree with you, poorer areas can be bland and devoid of street furniture, planting and infrastructure - creating the POI opportunity, and given what we know about tags those are more likely to be the item that attracts tagging depth.

@fpagenk I didn’t brushoff anything off actually, I went to extra lengths to count and write about things within the confines of a diary post - and I gave the tagging depth finding good coverage of the observed differences between deprived and affluent areas. By the way it is strange for you to suggest that I can compare things mapped against things that might exist in greater density when the map of Dublin is generally incomplete. I disagree with you about deprived areas drawing in more nodes due to density, the opposite is true since oftentimes public housing in Ireland is multi-level apartment based, which in most cases isn’t subdivided and mapped as a single building=residential. I wish you posted more because you don’t actually explain what you mean about this being insufficient proof/disproof. It almost sounds like you didn’t like that I did this diary.

@Smef09 I understand, there are many reasons why a mapper will not map what’s right in front of them, and I also think these maxims may have been things to do in the past, but as the map fills up more they become less relevant. I know mappers whose reach is vast within Ireland. You are right, trees are an item that can be vandalised, and oftentimes that is a feature of deprived neighbourhoods. Do you only map trees?