Zluuzki,

This block is to serve as a warning that your import of United States Bureau of Ocean Energy Management data was an unacceptable breach of OSM import policy. Your history of undiscussed or undocumented imports of US Public Domain data into OSM that go against the guidelines have led the DWG to take this action. Please refrain from future imports without prior discussion with OSM community. I am blocking you for one day as an escalation of an earlier warning by woodpeck, which you seem to have ignored.

As an avid mapper myself, I am all for prudent, well-thought-out imports of data that fills a void that regular mappers would find tedious or difficult to map. Oil pipelines is certainly something that would be difficult to survey by your average mapper. While I appreciate your energy in tackling these import data conversions, you must abide by the rules that the community has made for imports. The import procedures are not “bureaucratic nonsense”–they are an important feature of our community map.

Finally, the changeset comment is not the appropriate venue to discuss an import. There is a plethora of forums for OSM these days, which make it easy to get an import proposal in front of many mappers quickly. I’d suggest posting in the Imports-US mailing list and on the new Discourse forum for the USA.

US BOEM Import

At issue today is the import of US BOEM petroleum platforms, subsea pipelines, and parcel leases. These items were imported in the following changesets:

• osm.org/changeset/128743600
• osm.org/changeset/128750019
• osm.org/changeset/128750303
• osm.org/changeset/128750310
• osm.org/changeset/128750316
• osm.org/changeset/128750321

The import of this dataset was incompatible with OSM not insofar as the PD license is concerned, but the manner in which you simply went ahead with it without notifying anyone, and then only added documentation in the wiki today, after the community flagged this via one of those changesets above.

I noticed you’d imported water leases in changeset 129300298 last week and you quickly reverted that one without discussion. If you were so quick to revert it, why not ask the community for feedback on the proposal prior to doing so? The import process can be arduous, but it is worth it to ensure quality. I have conducted a number of successful imports myself.

Other problematic imports for reference

1. Fire stations without conflation
2. Florida landuses (note, as much as I’d love for this to work, the map is too mature to do something like what was done in New Jersey or Mass. today. It would be very difficult to do any landuse imports without massive conflation.). Also this.
3. Chicken processing facilities
4. US National Gas stations
5. Alabama MS Buildings

Thanks for your cooperation,

Elliott Plack
OSMF Data Working Group