Dear user Pan,

the community has issues with your hyper-detailed mapping of sparse forests.

You have been involved in a community discussion on http://lists.openstreetmap.ch/archives/list/talk-ch@openstreetmap.ch/thread/MDNT4XCPD76OAUTMNBPFLN55KZS6FYBY/ in which many community members agreed that what you are doing is not very useful.

You are of the opinion that your data is “more precise” and that it should only ever be replaced by even better, even more precise data, and never simplified.

This reasoning is flawed. Your data has a pseudo-precision that is incorrect even by the time the imagery is published; this has been pointed out to you.

Maps are, by definition, an abstraction of reality. It is useful to know that a certain area is covered by forest, and where the edge of that forest is, but what you are doing is pure guesswork, drawing arbitrary boundaries in between sparse tree covers.

(There is a lingering question about your methods; frankly your contributions look a lot like they are auto-generated, often having many nodes in a straight line or shapes that look like they come right out of a raster-to-vector processing algorithm. I asked you yesterday and you have not replied.)

This work does not improve OSM; in fact it makes it harder to process and edit the data, and it threatens to reduce OSM to a poor man’s aerial image. We don’t want that - we want a map, not a copy of an aerial image. The mapper adds value by interpreting the aerial imagery and deciding what to call a forest and what not; you are not adding this value, instead you are doing the equivalent of using a green paintbrush and dotting the land with small green bits.

Someone will at some point delete or simplify your hyper-detailed forests, adding the abstraction that is neccessary for a map and that you fail to contribute. When this happens, you will not revert these edits as you have in osm.org/changeset/141555620 because such simplification of your over-detailed data is an improvement of the map, not - as you seem to believe - a destruction of valuable information. The hyper-detailed information you are contributing is neither precise nor valuable.

Given that this over-detailed information will vanish from OSM sooner or later, and rightly so, maybe you simply want to stop adding it in the first place.

Best regards
Frederik Ramm
OSMF Data Working Group
Ticket#2023092110000132