WhoDidIt is broken, it does not show changes by new users - otherwise, perhaps I would have noticed. A users added hundreds of - in my opinion - worthless PoIs to the data - lots of home addresses of crafts people, lots of outdated stuff : cafes that closed 15 year ago.
In the process they deleted dozens of churches, chapels and buildings where tourist accommodation was on offer. A local pointed out to them, that the information was outdated. The local corrected the wrongs. The excuse they gave translated: “I will forward your complaints. I just receive data from some company and map that, so don’t blame me” is a double lie. 1) They just went on with their thing. 2) OSM-Contributors act on their own - unless at gunpoint?
In another topic on vandalism, methods to limit capabilities of new users were discussed. This here is not vandalism, but the effect is not nice on data neither. Also I do not see how procedural ruses can help here. I also made some plunder when new and under the radar.
The community needs tools. WhoDidIt is a great tool and simple at that. Why is it not part of the OSMF sponsored toolchain? How about a slippy map that shows recent “review requested” changesets in such a way? The community should have means to engage with newbies.
PS: I restored the deleted entities - took a bit longer than an hour - don’t ask me why I did that. Learned a bit about which parts of the country have active contributors. Cleaning up the PoI mess left to StreetComplete users.
That’s a great idea, but as ever the execution is the tricky bit not the idea. It’s fairly trivial to create a database with changeset info in it (I wrote a diary entry about that yesterday!) - the tricky bit is the “small matter of programming” to present that information to people who might be interested in it.
Making that part of the main site would be a challenge - I know a couple of people who’ve tried to contribute there and succeeded, and both found the process frustrating. However, making a transparent tile layer with something like this in it doesn’t sound too difficult - do you fancy having a go?
I am honoured by the invitation. My coding skills sub par for such. In my opionion, WhoDidIt is the best tile overlay for such a thing and 99% there already.
No idea how to say that, maybe I am just looking for something a bit more accommodating than what the “history” button shows on the main view. Certainly OSMCha is cool, but not a lightweight neither.
It is mostly effect of OSMF having relatively minor resources.
There are some ongoing attempts to improve things, for example recent start of fundraising campaign (significant effort went into this - and we need it to keep at least as much as OSMF is doing right now).
In ideal world this and many other tools would be part of OSM website and there are attempts to get closer to it.
(Sorry for making it relatively vague but I am posting it without consulting other people on OSMF board and not as some official statement)