ftcat (2022-09-11 07:06:57+00:00): Hi,

It is not the amount of data being imported that is the problem but the quality of the data. When you say it is verified and cleared who has verified and cleared it? When I check some of the nodes you have imported I find either there is an existing building that has already been mapped at the point of your imported node so in this case you are duplicating the building. I other cases there is no building visible in the satellite imagery, I know that some of the imagery is out of date but in this case you can not be sure that the building no longer exists, as you know in rural areas of Zambia some buildings are not strongly built and are not permanent structures, 'kantembas' are often just made of grass. Also many rural shops open and close regularly, some mappers in Zambia are taking information from the Zambia Statistics agency (ZamStats) and uploading it without physically checking if the data is still valid. Much of this data contains misspellings and incorrect tags, building='Commercial_Building' is not a correct tag. 'Shop' is not a name of a shop but a description of its purpose, 'former hammer mill' is not a name but a description of the features previous use, what is it now? Also a more accurate tag for a shop would be building=retail.

When you upload a number of point and features in one upload with out looking at the features in the imagery before hand that is a bulk import, rather check each feature by inspecting the imagery and if there is a building already mapped apply the name and any other information necessary to that building already mapped, if there is no building mapped but it exists in the imagery map it and apply any of the required information such as name and purpose of the building to the mapped feature. An other problem is there is a great deal of unnecessary address information being added, such as ward and constituency, this may change over time so will become outdated, even districts change or new ones are created by dividing old ones.

The spirit of OpenStreetMap is to create a free map as accurate as possible, preferably mapped by local mappers who have local knowledge blindly uploading information to the map does not help as it degrades the data and reduces the effectiveness of the map. Africa is full of poor quality data, I am just trying to help ensure that the data in Zambia is as accurate as possible. May projects fill the map with bad information that then takes many hours to correct and remove, it is better to try add good information right from the start. I am assuming you are a local mapper, it would be better if you helped map and add detail to parts of the map you actually know and visit and check and correct errors in those places. Don't blindly follow Microsoft building footprints for example as they often mistake the giant billboards around Lusaka as buildings, when looking at this information again check and use you knowledge to correctly map what is in the image.

If we all follow these guidelines we can, over time create an accurate and reliable map of Zambia that is of  great help to other users who may not know much about Zambia and Africa as a whole, if the data is of poor quality they will not trust the map and ignore information that is accurate.

Thanks for contributing to OSM.