Clarification on note handling and resolution guidelines

General talk
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My personal approach with notes is this: I make a note when something is broken or incorrect by the thing the note refers to being mapped improperly. For example, the service ways of a parking lot not being mapped by itself doesn’t seem like an especially pressing problem (this is normally just a lack of detail, the “default”) but it can be more clearly important when a POI is closer to one adjacent street than another but there’s no access into the parking lot from that street, so navigation tries to put users on an invalid path.

A good note gives a good impression of what issue resolving it would solve, some sense of the urgency of the issue, and an easily actionable path to resolution. Something like “this village has no sidewalks mapped” is actionable, but not easily (it’s more of a small project than a single issue), and doesn’t convey why the sidewalks here are so important to map as opposed to anywhere else that their absence is an exceptional issue.

Going through a phase of my OSM participation where I often didn’t have a lot of time to work on any particular thing got me to appreciate this a bit. There are improvements to be made all around, but a lot of them are realistically just “nice to haves”. Notes should be for small improvements whose absence is causing some kind of issue.

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22

I never said to write notes with “this could be mapped better” but I always said that something was missing from 0, not wrong shapes, not wrong tags (for which you should use fixme tags) but for things that are just not on the map. Those are 2 different things what I said and what you say.

It would be nice to map everything, but often in OSM we only focus on roads and buildings, the rest is ignored, so why not highlight the absence of something?

everything is useful on osm, that’s why you don’t have to close the notes without solving them!

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Where does it say that notes are only for non-mappers? This seems to me to be a false idea that many have. The absence of the entire network of sidewalks as it can be of anything else is a “problem” that needs to be solved as much as a missing shop. There is no other tool to report the absence of something (fixme tag is only for errors in existing OECD tags). I also map and I believe that there is a need to point out the lack of something since sidewalks like other things are never part of the priority of 99% of mappers (I am not forcing anyone to resolve the note). Only roads and buildings are modified, why can’t the problem be pointed out? Instead of making a thousand notes for each single missing sidewalk, why not make a single one if they are missing on all the streets of a neighborhood or a small center of a city? I keep saying that closing the note without solving it is illegal, if you don’t have time to address the problem, leave it open, don’t close it!!

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IMHO it is implicit. I do not say that mappers should never open a note, but generally I would expect that mappers solve problems instead of listing them, if one as a mapper opens more notes than they close, there would be something wrong about it, IMHO.

because, as we already said above, there is no set of “must have” features or properties. Arguably, we are aiming at mapping all streets and many people are focussing on this, but it isn’t forbidden either to map forests or peaks where the roads are yet missing. Would you appreciate if I added some generic notes in your hometown “commissioning” some free work to do, like “building colors missing in the whole town”, “fountain types are not mapped yet”, “add kerb heights everywhere”, “tree species missing”, “street cabinets and types mostly missing”, “fences and fence heights are missing”, “wall types not specified for barrier=wall”, “streetlamps missing”, “specify masonry type”, “most fire hydrants are missing”, etc. etc.

In OSM it is the mappers who decide what to map, it is their free time, and they are free to focus on what they prefer. When I started mapping in 2008, I added many drinking fountains despite sometimes the streets not being drawn yet (in retrospect, it would sometimes have been helpful to at least sketch some part of the street to make it clear on which side of the road the feature is located, but on the meantime these all got sorted out).

If you add generic notes with comments like “A and B missing everywhere here”, it will distract people from finding useful notes which actually have suffient information to base your mapping on it, so closing the not helpful ones is the correct answer to advance the project as a whole.

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Unfortunately, everyone has their own priorities when mapping on OSM, so we can’t easily give a guideline on what work to start. When there is something wrong (shape or tag) you should use fix me tags, not notes. I found myself reporting the lack of sidewalks because I was planning a long walking route and I would have needed to have them mapped, since many mappers don’t consider them, maybe someone willing would take this little project in hand and fix the problem. Instead, someone preferred to close the note without solving it. Without official documentation or guidelines on the use of notes, no one can decide what is right and what is wrong

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If we were to say that notes force a mapper to do something then we should ban them.
If a mapper chooses to follow notes and not his “instinct” he obviously has no idea what to do but wants to lend a hand and relies on notes. So why do you want to ban notes that require more time than simpler ones? It will be the mapper who decides whether to spend a whole week mapping the sidewalks of a neighborhood or choose to map the ancient tree protected by local laws. Everyone chooses what to do (as you say and I agree). I am not forcing anyone to do anything with my notes, I am just reporting a problem, then whoever wants to take over the project. I myself have been mapping all the sidewalks in my city for months going neighborhood by neighborhood, so it is not impossible.
I also don’t understand what more details you want for the sidewalks, they are simple sidewalks. Maybe you want thousands of notes for every single meter of missing sidewalk? It becomes spam of notes, better to make a single one…

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The reason I want to discourage notes which do not provide specific information but rather are attemps to assign some kind of investigation task to someoneelse, is that it leads us into the situation where we are now with notes. Tens of thousands of open notes in many countries, some for more than 10 years, and too few people fixing them, likely even looking at them. It is discouraging to see a sea of notes, while just a few notes (speaking for myself) would be encouraging going to discover what kind of information is waiting to be added.

I have already tried to explain it before, missing sidewalks aren’t “a problem”, they are the default, no note needed to say “all sidewalks are missing”, it is implicit.

naturally you can have all kind of properties on sidewalks, like width, surface, smoothness, lit, start_date, etc.

No, as I said, I would expect the note creator to map these, rather than trying to assign tasks to others…

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no, having 400 notes “there is an unmapped grass area here” is NOT useful
and this is an actual real case we had (notes got closed and hidden, at some point with automated bot run by DWG)

having note “some shops are not mapped in this city” is not useful either (also a real case)

because notes that I mentioned, like “would be nice if all sidewalks here would get mapped” or “would be nice if all shop in city would get mapped” are nearly unfixable, and would just stay there for long time irritating people who process notes? While bringing no benefit?

And having an actual negative effects in terms of discouraging people to even look at notes?

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:+1:

100% agreement!

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30

Exactly.

As a guideline, I would suggest: if a note cannot be fixed by another mapper in 5 minutes or less, it is likely too general and one should not be leaving a note[1]

Because one “lump sum” megatask is untrackable and extremely hard to manage, and nobody would be able to ever solve it in practice, and such useless notes would accumulate to the point that nobody would even be attempting to look at them (not even those good and solvable ones).

Spamming the map with thousands of notes on each street saying “missing sidewalk information” would be even less acceptable. Want something that big mapped? Go map it yourself. I’d recommend StreetComplete for that particular task, as it is quick and smooth to map sidewalk existence while you walk around.

It is also a question of reciprocity in social interactions. It is just plain rude to invest a 10 seconds to write a note that it would take someone a week of full 8hours days to resolve.
(you can see a similar phenomenon these days where people offload enormous amount of AI-written unverified code slop, and expect the maintainers to validate and merge it)

If short - in collaborative volunteer project, you should not expect others to do much more work on some issue, then you’re willing to invest yourself on that same issue. Especially if the reason why you’re delegating work to others is “it is too much work for me now” or “I had other plans, so can’t be bothered to do it myself”.

Remember: writing an OSM Note is asking for help from strangers. As in real life it might be fine e.g. to ask some random local citizen for help finding that soccer stadium if you’re lost; but insisting that they must organize the transport for you to said stadium would likely not be a great idea. At the very least, one should not be surprised with their negative reaction to such request.

  1. but rather investing time to resolve the whole job themselves – or just doing nothing: we know infinitely many things are missing on the map ↩︎

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I think it is going too far. Some cases of vandalism cleanup sadly take longer and making note is valid in such cases.

But in general, I think that “why you are expecting others to do what note requests, if you are not doing it by yourself” at some point applies. Especially if note is about adding something rather than fixing very broken existing data.

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BTW, Czy OK jest zamykanie masowo otwieranych notek o mało istotnych rzeczach, tam gdzie i tak wymagana jest wizyta na miejscu? resulted in adding Pl:Uwagi - OpenStreetMap Wiki to Polish page about notes on wiki.

we added explicit

In the case of groups of notes about missing, non-essential items, where an on-site visit is required anyway, you can leave one note from the entire group and close the others. A typical case is “there’s a shrine here.” If the note is completely irrelevant, such as “add landuse=grass,” there’s no need to leave any.

to wiki documentation in Polish after “new” account started to reopen pointless notes.

Polish community was following such guidelines already, for years. Just it was not documented anywhere.

And yes we had cases where someone entirely covered park in “add bench” notes* or even literally “I demand landuse=grass to be mapped here immediately” (translated from Polish, spam wave was hidden by DWG).

* solvable where benches visible on aerial, less when under trees

(processing notes in Poland is quite healthy, partially because it is accepted that people solving notes are authority on which ones should be treated as useless and just closed)

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Well, vandalism is a case in itself, and I prefer letting DWG know and handle it. (or just handle it myself if it is small and trivial; but then again it is going to be less than 5 minutes).

Because, if it is something that takes hours, and a public Note is left, it seems likely that several mapper might start fixing it at a same time, probably resulting in bigger mess that it was originally.

Maybe it is missing context (or translation from Polish is confusing), but I’m not getting what situation is this about?

e.g. If here were say 3 notes about shoe shop being out of business, and a missing restaurant data, and a shrine not being mapped; is it saying first 2 should be closed without solving ?! That would be quite strange policy to me.

Or is it just if there were say 5 shrines missing in the area, with 5 notes saying “shrine is missing” but at a different location? Then it might make a little more sense, but still, why not map the shrines if all the data is there and it takes few seconds?

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that is fine if shrine is visible on aerial/Mapillary/Panoramax etc

but often data is NOT there, and mapping requires survey

and mapping based solely on untrustworthy note is a really bad idea (even if note author is trying to be helpful these are often misplaced/confused)

In such case keeping one note and closing twenty “there is a cross here” scattered across forest is considered as a good idea, at least in Poland. Maybe because we have too much of note creation enthusiasts?

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Related:

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Here is a counter example: Note: 5395519 | OpenStreetMap. The short version of that note is: “all those path into the back alleys are an inconsistent mix of tunnel=building_passage, layer=-1, covered=yes. You have to check each one individually and may have to split off a building=roof from the current outline”.
I only noticed this inconsistency because of StreetComplete. It was a case of “StreetComplete asks this quest, therfore the data is broken”.

This is my “lump sum megatask” to track progress and as a reminder to everyone in that area to not blindly choose whichever answer in StreetComplete is the least wrong here; they could all be wrong. Also, considering this one note covers the entire historical city centre, and I only visit that city a few times a year this note will take a year or two to complete for me alone. But that is also the plus side of public notes, anyone can join in and do a part if they want.

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You seem to be under impression that leaving the Note there would help with StreetComplete users answers?

If so, I am afraid you’re overly optimistic.

Firstly, that specific note you linked would not even be shown to vast majority of StreetComplete users (unless they went and fiddled with settings, which I’d guess[1] 99% of them didn’t do). StreetComplete does not show all open notes (not even if you go in settings and manually enable extra notes showing, and much less by default).

Secondly, even if the note was shown, it assumes users will purposedly first seek Note Quests and read them (and understand them), before solving other quests. I sincerely doubt that. Because:

  • vast majority of users usually go and solve quests as they are nearest them. So (unless you make circle of dozens of notes around the affected area[2]) they are unlikely to see them until it’s too late and they’ve already made their answers
  • many of the StreetComplete users users do not even speak English
  • even of those that do speak it, majority of StreetComplete users have no idea what the “tags” even are, much less what they mean and what is the difference between them (which is why they use StreetComplete which asks simple natural language questions and explicitly not require any OSM knowledge)

Thirdly, it seems to be XY problem. You seem to want to educate SC users that there exists Uh... / Can't say option that they should use if none of offered answers match the reality, if I understand correctly?

Yet you talk about complex OSM Notes instead (even though those won’t really influence vast majority of StreetComplete users)

Yeah, however also note:

  • most of the editors / data consumers do not show Notes by default
  • even when they do, not all users read them and may disable them (because many of them are way too complex and/or lack information to be actionable from their editor[3])
  • the more of such unsolvable notes there are, the more likely are even people who would solve them otherwise to disable Notes functionality completely

So, you should be aware that opening such complex-to-solve notes is double edged-sword, even in cases where it does make sense.

At the very least, if you are insistent on leaving them, I suggest adding at last #volonteeeringforsurvey text in such notes (see Tags denoting note status and note comments) and even inventing (and documenting) your own (e.g. #complex).

That way at least note solvers who only want to solve simple ones would have a way to keep solving them, instead of giving up due to map being peppered with practically unsolvable notes, without means to distinguish them from easily solvable notes.

Also, if you leave complex notes; please consider prioritizing your time in solving other complex notes left by others (so you solve at least[4] as many complex notes as you create complex notes) to be at least complex-note-neutral, if not even helping Notes functionality being more usable in that regard.

(Not that I’m trying to force anyone to do anything![5] – I’m just noting that asking of others to put amount of effort one wouldn’t even consider putting themself would be discouraging and counterproductive in the end)

(Disclaimer: even if osmstats claims I’m in top-30 note solvers, this is just my personal opinion and how it affects me personally and other note-solvers I know. Other people are of course welcome to their own opinion. I mostly solve simple notes[6], although I do occasionally do solve some specific more complex one, it is an exception rather then a rule)

  1. given the target audience ↩︎

  2. and please don’t! ↩︎

  3. e.g. notes requiring #surveyme on-the-ground survey are not useful for armchair editors, and notes requiring editing geometries or general tags are not useful for StreetComplete users ↩︎

  4. and preferably more ↩︎

  5. it is all volunteer effort, so you do what you want! ↩︎

  6. certainly more than 99% of them ↩︎