Nobody said there should never be manual touch-ups, but you can certainly do manual touch-ups on top of bulk imports. Everyone else does. A process which depends on a ton of unpaid manual labor to do what bulk imports should be doing is not very scalable... if you have that labor, why not ensure that it goes to the touchups rather than to duplicating things people have already done and want to contribute
>A process which depends on a ton of unpaid manual labor to do what bulk imports should be doing is not very scalable...
Oh. I think yes this is scalable. I'll give folks some examples of how crowd-sourcing works like this, and how it can be scalable.
1. A person knows where they live, they can add their own street. They may know their neighbourhood, they can map it from scratch, or more likely keep it up to date. The user may see that their family home or where they vacation needs a tweak here and there, and pops on and edits. It's very casual, very local based monitoring and editing. This is scalable in the sense that it's small tasks that take a small time.
2. Based on an academic evaluation of a countries government's base map and OSM, several places are shown to be less well covered in OSM. These are targets for more dedicated mappers to examine, on foot, or with aerial imagery to improve. Hardcore mappers mainly here, large tasks, large time.
3. Mapping workshops are held in a small town to blitz a new development, fill holes and cover an entire area all at once. Twenty participants can do a large area with transport and the right equipment.
4. web based task manager is set up to allocate squares of land for people to trace from, dozens of people can take a small square and trace over the top. Local knowledge can then quickly add in names and landmarks.
So you can see that there are a number of different crowd-sourced labour approaches which would replicate what an import would do, but that by crowdsourcing you actually increase the number of people in that labour pool. An import does not help increase the number of contributors.
Now, this is more scalable in developed countries where there are more people with time to donate (same applies to any unpaid crowdsourced project), and so that example no. 1 in developing countries of an organic community keeping things up to date wouldn't really happen. However it's quite widespread in the developing world that there are no proprietary datasets of any decent quality. Imports could not even be considered in these places.
The problem with manual touch-ups on imported data is that when a newer version of the bulk data is released there's a difficulty with how to merge the datasets. This is the problem the US mappers are finding with the newer versions of TIGER.
