Creating this thread as a way for anyone to document mappers in India, whose edits might seem weird, or just straight up making crass edits (which may or may not be vandalism).
Have been making significant amount of contributions, so much so that both are in the top 5 mappers of India as of writing this on OSMstats (RIP @Vonter’s days of leading)
Primarily map on weekdays, indicating that they do it possibly as a part of their job(s)
I’d consider it organsing editing, which means the company behind these folks are not in line with the policy for the same. I’m trying to figure out who is the company behind this, and get in touch with them regarding this.
As SE mentioned, when you look at Changeset: 167863565 | OpenStreetMap “DWG of undiscussed automated edits by shanmugamrs”, with a blue star against his user name to show Moderator, does sort of give that away!
This changeset has been reverted fully or in part by changesets 169841222, 169841249, 169841240, 169841260, 169841200, 169841256, 169841237, 169841215, 169841214, 169841228, 169841245, 169841232 where the changeset comment is: DWG revert: incompatible source
It’s reasonably common for even long-established mappers to get a “0-hour block”, where they simply have to read our message (often simple things like “please respond to CCs” etc) before continuing to map, they read the message, then don’t map again
I had emailed both the DWG and to the given email in Ola’s organised editing page. Seems like the folks at Ola have been really cooperative, assuring to look into the matter.
India prefers “Bharat” over “India” since it’s a transliteration of its Hindi name
I got no clue which “India” does this person come from, but it would cause a literal f*cking civil war in mine. Thankfully, arkarjun took care of it fast enough by reverting the changes, but still we can’t let this person off the hook. Had it been some editor based in India, it would’ve been an entirely different thing, but they don’t even live anywhere near the country. So idk, maybe the DWG could send a warning to them?
P.S: I already emailed about this, it’s ticket#2025082310000181
Quick correction: It seems like arkarjun’s edits didn’t revert the name=*, so I did it.
Here’s where I got the idea that India (or Bharat) “prefers” Hindi over English:
From Wikipedia: “According to Part XVII of the Constitution of India, Hindi in the Devanagari script is the official language of the Union, along with English as an additional official language.”
Hindi is native to India, whole English is only used because that was the language of its former colonizers. It isn’t unheard of for countries to change its name from a colonial language to a native one, like Swaziland changing its name to eSwatini, or Turkey to Türkiye.
I simply don’t understand why are they trying to tell us how to represent ourselves.
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