I thought that this article “Assuring the quality of volunteered geographic information” was super interesting. Encompassing the evolution of “uncertainty” in GIScience was interesting, and a welcome addition as a segue into the three approaches into quality assurance (crowd-sourcing, social, and geographic).
Exploring the social approach further, it stipulates that there will always be a hierarchy, even within a seemingly broad/open structure. Goodchild & Li discussed briefly that there is often a small amount of users who input information and a smaller amount of people who verify that information, in addition to the large number of constant users.
For future additions to OSM or other crowd-sourced sites, it would be super interesting to show who’s actually editing/adding, and make that info easily available and present on the screen. Currently in OSM, one can see usernames of the most recent editors of an area, and with some more digging, one can find out all the users that have edited in an area, and with even more digging, one can look at these editors’ bios or frequently mapped places and try to piece together info about them that way. I guess it would be more of a question of privacy (especially in areas where open data isn’t really encouraged, or where there aren’t a lot of editors other than bots, or both), but hopefully this sort of post-positivist change comes. I recently learned that most of OSM’s most active users & validators (worldwide) are white North American males between the ages of 18 and 40, which unfortunately is not unbelievable, and begs further questions about what information is being mapped and what’s being left out. Some info isn’t mapped as the mappers are not interested in this information (for example, what a 25 year old guy would want to see on a map may not even overlap with what a 65 year old woman would want to see on a map. This gets even more tangled when also considering gender, geographic, or ethnic/”race” dimensions). Showing this information, or at least making it less difficult to find or access without lots of time and adequate sleuthing skills, might compel layman users to be more interested in where exactly their information is coming from.