How Many Volunteers Does it Take to Map an Area Well? The Validity of Linus’ Law to Volunteered Geographic Information

TLDR

In volunteered geographic information, spatial data quality is challenged by non‑standard procedures and uncoordinated contributors, and the community assumes that increasing contributor numbers improve quality, a principle known as Linus’ Law. The study aims to test whether Linus’ Law—higher contributor counts lead to better data quality—holds for VGI positional accuracy. The authors conducted three studies on OpenStreetMap data to assess the relationship between contributor counts and positional accuracy. The analyses confirm that Linus’ Law applies to VGI positional accuracy, with more contributors yielding higher accuracy.

Abstract

title/>In the area of volunteered geographical information (VGI), the issue of spatial data quality is a clear challenge. The data that are contributed to VGI projects do not comply with standard spatial data quality assurance procedures, and the contributors operate without central coordination and strict data collection frameworks. However, similar to the area of open source software development, it is suggested that the data hold an intrinsic quality assurance measure through the analysis of the number of contributors who have worked on a given spatial unit. The assumption that as the number of contributors increases so does the quality is known as ‘Linus’ Law’ within the open source community. This paper describes three studies that were carried out to evaluate this hypothesis for VGI using the OpenStreetMap dataset, showing that this rule indeed applies in the case of positional accuracy.