Bulk edit: IHM & Mapeak images change

Communities ישראל (Israel)
1

At Mapeak and formerly IHM we value open data a lot. We are active participants in the OSM community and make sure our users’ data is uploaded to OSM.

Similarly, we upload our images to wikimedia commons so that the images will stay in the community’s hands and avoid the “closed garden” problem that exists with a lot of similar applications.

To make sure we follow the legal requirements of wikimedia we hired an IP specialist law firm and paid a decent amount of money for it. We changed our website and app according to the suggested changes to make sure we follow the legal requirements.

Recently, a wikimedia editor has flagged all the images our users uploaded (more than 8k images) for deletion since, according to him, they do not follow with wikimedia’s legal requirement.

One of the requirements that was raised is that the users will open a wikimedia account and login with it in order to upload images, which is not a practical requirement from our users and app.

We have tried hard to find a way forward out of this situation and avoid this deletion, but have come to a dead end.

It is with great regret that I’m posting this message notifying the community that we will migrate all the images our users uploaded to our images service as images.mapeak.com.
This is a new service we recently created to support this and it’s code can be found here:

Below is an example csv file of the migration we are planning to do.

osm-image-urls.csv (3.0 MB)

The migration will only change the images tags from the previous wikimedia image link to our images service.

Here’s an example of an image a user uploaded on the new service.

The page link:

The image link itself:

acf9d2e7df6a0accd5c20f37a71a23b2
acf9d2e7df6a0accd5c20f37a71a23b21600×1200 677 KB

The metadata of that image including its license:

https://images.mapeak.com/acf9d2e7df6a0accd5c20f37a71a23b2.json

A small image for thumbnail etc:

acf9d2e7df6a0accd5c20f37a71a23b2
acf9d2e7df6a0accd5c20f37a71a23b2250×188 15.7 KB

I’ll be happy to answer any questions people have about this bulk edit.

Questions about the future of Mapeak in relation to OSM/open data/FOSS
2

Could you post a link to the relevant Wikimedia discussions?

In the one discussion I managed to find, the argument for deletion is that the original user did not necessarily consent to the upload, which sounds like a weak argument to me for the reasons you mentioned in your reply.

3

These are the relevant recent links, there are more deleting request in the past as well:

4

The person who initiated the deletion request believes this is a strong-enough argument, and that seems to be enough to have the images deleted.

6

Deleted content above will be moved to a dedicated thread.

7

I’d like to emphasize a few points:

  • The entire change was forced upon us by Wikimedia Commons. Nothing can change the way in which the existing pictures were already loaded. It is their initiative to delete the pictures.

  • The pictures will continue to be available, keeping their original open license, from a new server that Mapeak will provide on its own expense.