It seems that a local university or CÉGEP has asked their students to contribute to OSM for an assignment. Contributions so far have been in very poor quality, ranging from just a poor understanding of what kinds of tags to use, to changing boundaries to roads. I have already reverted a few bad edits, and asked the DWG to issue 0-hour blocks on the contributors who have ignored feedback and continued to make bad edits.
Some of the contributions contain data that is useful, but will need to be looked at manually in order to determine what is good and what isn’t. All of the edits need some amount of fixes.
I’m making this thread to track the users involved and report back as I fix their errors. Please feel free to help out!
You could try mailing one of the administrators listed in the department website at Staff - Concordia University to see if they can get you in touch with the prof for that course, maybe?
This is definitely a problem because it seems the teacher of this course do not give proper explanation and training to students. Before I ask my students to contribute to OpenStreetMap, I give them hours of courses to teach them how to map data and I restrict them to specific issues, like realigning streets and adding sidewalks, and make sure they connect them to the road network so routing is not broken. I also supervise their work and fix errors that they may have added or ask them to fix them promptly. I also ask them to edit in suburbs and regional villages where the road networks are less complicated and where it is easy to fix/valdiate.
COUF is one of my students. Is there any problem in their edits lately? If so, tell me where and I will fix it with them. I do no know any of the other users listed.
If data is clearly bogus/bad it should be reverted as soon as possible, as additional edits may turn something easily fixable into complicated operation taking hours to repair data.
Some data consumers take infrequent snapshots of OSM data. So even if it’s only live in the main OSM database for a few days, it could be shown on some apps/websites for many months (if the timing is unlucky).
To be constructive, if you really need that data, it isn’t lost even if reverted; the changeset will remain forever. So you can still collect and analyse them. See e.g. Can I get changeset data of every changeset I've ever made? - OSM Help
I’m sure there are visualisation tools, perhaps Overpass can help with that.
If there is a reason for your request that you believe outweighs all our concerns, then please be specific.
To add to what the others have said, you will likely need to use a service that visualizes your students’ changesets while grading, because if you grade based on what is live on OSM you will largely be grading my work, since I am correcting the issues!
I use this website: https://overpass-api.de/achavi/?changeset= (with the changeset number at the end) Here is an example of a real changeset on that site. You can see the changes represented by colour-coded lines and nodes, and when you hover over one it will show you the changes to its tags (if relevant).
You can grade their own edits with the website I linked. Their changeset numbers are available on their OSM profile pages. Grading from live OSM would never be a good idea, because even without this discussion having happened, edits happen constantly and what you are looking at may not be the same as what your students did.
You are asking students to contribute to an open data project, but the course material for the assignment isn’t open? That is problematic.
This editing activity seems to fall under the Organised Editing Guidelines - OpenStreetMap Wiki
If you had followed these guidelines, you would have informed the community before editing started, shared the instructions they would be using, and asked for feedback from the community.
In any case, involving the local OSM community would be a good idea. You probably could even get one or more of them to present the lessons on OSM to your class.
This is not how OSM works, anyone is free to edit the map at any time, especially if the data is wrong. @une_abeille has provided a method that you can see your student’s edits even if they have been overwritten by others. Continuing to ask the community to change how it operates to accommodate your class project (that incidentally already may violate the organized editing guidelines) demonstrates a lack of understanding of OSM and hubris.
My apologies if I have offended the community. It was not my intent; My requests were not out of “hubris” for my needs but concern for my students attempting to learn about the platform. Also, it was an attempt to solve a problem cooperatively and civilly. I will explore the solutions offered thus far without any other expected assistance from you or other OSM members.
Tom,
Thanks for your willingness to discuss with the community and come to a solution that works for all. I definitely understand your concerns that students’ work will be modified or removed before grading. And we appreciate you contributing to education and awareness about the project!!
Ultimately I agree with others here that since OSM data is used in production by a wide variety of consumers, low-quality edits can’t really be knowingly left as-is. (Side note: There are a staggering number of undetected low-quality edits waiting to be discovered and corrected! OSM is not a perfect dataset.)
I recall that work is being done on a staging/test server for test changes, but can’t remember the details.
To add on to @une_abeille’s suggestion, here is an example link to another website called OsmCha that will show your students’ contributions in a given changeset, even if the features they touched are later deleted or modified.
Again I appreciate your willingness to discuss and work something out!
I don’t think this is the issue here. There are many new contributors to OSM every day and many of them make mistakes. I myself make mistakes even - or especially - in features that I have mapped a lot.
OSM always needed to handle inexperienced users. As such, a lively community formed to find them, show them their mistakes and help them to learn the established conventions. In some cases, they proactively ask for advice on how to tag things. The bad data gets corrected (either by the author or someone else) in any case.
This approach works fine in the open environment that OSM usually operates in, where correct data is the ultimate goal. An assignment, however, doesn’t necessarily have that goal, instead it wants to see and evaluate what the student knows or is able to. And that is what your request would achieve: A state where the data is “correct” according to the student (which can be evaluated against a known standard).
As such the request to stop fixing bad data goes against what the quote above argues for. Not fixing their errors prevents them from learning. Not removing bad data doesn’t show them that they made a mistake. I can imagine that simply pointing out their mistakes via comments is interfering with your evaluation. The request does work for an exam setting, where not learning but consistent grading is the goal.
OSM relies on instant feedback for its functioning, your grading relies on delayed feedback (after the submission deadline) for evaluation. These two processes cannot be run on the same platform (osm.org) at the same time.
All this to say: Please continue encouraging your students to contribute to OSM! But please be aware that OSM as a community project works a certain way and “tagging for the exam” is bad practice for our purposes.
Thanks for trying to involve new students to OSM. I would like to point out - handling community-interaction and handling the errors someone made should be absolutely part of the lessons.
Nobody expects newcomers to be experts, but to answer when something is asked in a changeset is absolutely expected in this community project.
I would also like to suggest to make it an requirement for a good grade to have added the information about the class/school whatever Organised Editing Guidelines - OpenStreetMap Foundation - this can also be part of the learning on why this has to be done.
A lot of this stuff is not to annoy a teacher or someone at all, but to help them get approval of the community, even if it may be annoying.
(On a sidenote, its really annoying you are trying to delete your posts in this forum. Its annoying to read them now…)
It is frustrating that @tmcgurk has chosen to delete their messages. I did get a look at the training material and it contained several issues that I had planned on outlining so they could be augmented, but that is no longer possible.
I’ve just started a new position at work and am currently extremely busy training, so I’m currently not available to put in the hours required to repair some of the rest of the damage here. If someone could lend a hand it would be appreciated. This utility seems to currently being experiencing a problem but once it’s back up it might be a good resource. There were a few problem changesets a few days back that I commented on and got no reply, including some address deletions, address moves >1 block, and dragged building nodes. These would probably be highest priority for repair.
