Debate about open notes in Brazil and the world and how we can create an efficient mechanism for a large amount of open notes

General talk
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Discussion about the excessive number of notes created in OSM by mappers around the world and in Brazil.

I am here to discuss the subject of creating notes in OSM.

It is not the creation of notes itself, everyone has the right to create notes in OSM, as it is a useful tool for marking new areas to be mapped in OSM, as it helps to mark an area that needs mapping in a region anywhere in the world, but the large number of notes opened and forgotten in OSM by many mappers.

This causes great damage to the information being entered in the note, and years later it still has not been mapped, such as a store or a business in general, where over time this information may already be out of date.

With the large number of open notes in OSM in Brazil, some of them 8 years, 6 years, 4 years, and even 2 years old, and many recent ones, it was at a monthly meeting created by Brazilian mappers that we decided to form a task force to close these long-open notes, and this brought significant results never before seen in Brazil. In one month, we almost reached the number of 1,700 closed notes, a number never before seen in Brazil in terms of closed notes.

and for this reason many notes are forgotten in OSM and the note creator continue to create notes without first closing his own notes and that I see that we could discuss what would be the maximum amount of notes created, because I have seen mapper with many notes created and not closed, such as a mapper with 89 thousand notes, How would a mapper be able to create this large quantity of notes without preocular in closing their notes or at least being careful with the large number of open notes.

believe that with a limit number of notes created and as the notes are being closed the mapper could create more notes and so we would have an evolution in note creation and not leave the data that is inserted into the old notes and forgotten over time, because an information of 8 years ago may not make sense since 8 years and a lot of time and the information is being updated at all times.

is here open to discourse so that we can evaluate this issue of notes opened and forgotten in OSM.

as well as creating a mechanism so that the opened notes have a quantity and the measure they are being closed to possibilities of new notes can be created.

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FYI: here in Belgium there’s also been a discussion about how to efficiently treat the large number of open notes.

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https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-notes-country?c=Brazil has general note overview for Brazil

Latest log for OpenStreetMap (OSM) notes of Brazil @ ResultMaps.neis-one.org has listing of open notes, around 6000 of them

I looked through them, closed some (especially ones with photo attached are often remotely fixable). But I am running in language barrier so I will likely not process more.

are you sure that someone opened 89 000 notes? AFAIK there is no such account that opened so many notes, there is no account that opened more than 40 000 notes (across entire world)

note that profile page counts all note actions, including comments and closures - not only opened notes

I would try to avoid risk of going too far in another direction: mass closing valid, important and useful notes is not improving things

similarly blindly trusting claims in notes is also a poor idea - some are wrong or outright malicious

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No, he opened ~34 000 notes, closed about 52 000 notes and commented on ~ 1000 notes, in the iD profile there is the number of nearly 90 000 notes (currently 89 712).

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Even with this number of 34 thousand open notes, I believe that for a human being this large amount of open notes would be impossible to keep track of all these notes created and that they will probably remain on the OSM map for someone to close one day.

Since if there was a limit to creating new notes, so many new notes would not be created before closing the old notes.

This is the point to be discussed here.

Is it worth leaving so many notes open without closing them or creating notes as old notes are closed.

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This amount of 6,802 notes in total in Brazil in the month of May shows the effort we made to close more than 1,629 notes and that it was the only month in which we closed many notes, since the notes opened in the history show that more notes were always opened than closed.

The information on these old notes may no longer be current as time passes and these notes are not closed and simply only notes are opened.

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Yes, until they get resolved, either by someone driving there and looking or through additional suddenly availbale resources like good aerial imagery or ground level imagery. Whats the problem with open notes? Thats exactly what they are for “Here is something wrong/missing.”

I think there are not enough users who would fall into that category anyway, so its some effort for that solution for close to no benefit.

I don’t see a problem with a lot of open notes.

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for notes so old that info is not useful (say, 10 year old note about shop being somewhere) can be simply closed, it is not a problem

but 10 months old or 10 day old note about shop is not so old to be closed solely because it is old