I am new to the idea of discussing additions to OSM and like to do my best to follow best practices in suggesting an import. I live in Tennessee US. The State of Tennessee has made available a number of data sets without any licence restriction at tn-tnmap.opendata.arcgis.com. Right now the data sets I would like to import are building locations and park trail maps. I would like to post the import suggestion of the imports to imports@openstreetmap.org and talk-us@openstreetmap.org .
What information should I include in the post to open discussion? The wiki page Import/Guidelines does not give much guidance on what info to post to the above mentioned groups.
As other people suggested on the import / talk-us mailing lists, I am also in favour to first learn to map from observation / local knowledge before embarking on an import.
Please be very careful with trail data in particular. If it’s particularly old data (coughCanVeccough), it may be based on aerial photos with a lot of guesswork, and be of very little use in actually finding a trail when you’re lost in the bush on the ground.
Worst of all, eventually you end up with two trails mapped in a valley. One recorded by a hiker with GPS, and one from the import, in a somewhat different location. Does the second one actually exist? Only a site visit can tell for sure (trails are hard to spot from space), so the bad data can linger in OSM almost forever. To emphasize, it is very time consuming to verify that an imported trail does not exist, and remove it.