Hi, I noticed many different accounts ( wjc31, KewpieIsGod, WI NOMAD, DBC141, TedTimesSix, Mark of Zorro ecc.ecc.) adding “Flock Safety” ALPRs in the United States in the last five months. These elements were added by different users, but they all made the same “mistake” (invalid Q-Items, e.g. operator:wikidata=(WikiData ID), see this query), which made me think of an undocumented import and/or organized edit and/or sockpuppets. But I’m not a local so I report it here so you locals can check it better. I tought maybe it was just different users copying another ALPR tag list, but I see some used the same weird bracket pattern for tags there were not present already in the database, e.g. operator=(AllentownPolice). Some accounts were created just a day apart. Most of them only added Flock Safety cameras and made 2-30 changesets to then disappear. It looks like a weird pattern to me, but again, I prefere to leave any decision to the local community.
These are coming from people seeing https://deflock.me/ due to increased coverage of that site. It encourages people to add the cameras to OSM, and these folks are probably just new mappers making mistakes.
You are right, seems like people is blindly copying the tags they suggest. Mystery solved, thanks. Maybe we could contact them to make the tag list less prone to errors? I guess most people is not familiar with Wikidata.
The suggested tags came out of this discussion:
I recently began adding local cameras as I see them. When I began, ID had a preset if you searched for ‘Flock’. Now you have to start with surveillance camera and continue from there. Possibly the Wikidata info was corrected then. I never consult Wikidata directly but just use the ID preset.
NSI (which the iD presets incorporate) removed the Flock preset because it came to their attention that operator was the wrong place to put “Flock Safety”. You can see the discussion that took place on that here. Nothing has replaced it yet because the discussion kinda stalled on how to square the competing needs of tagging Flock as a manufacturer and tagging particular police departments as operators. I’m not quite familiar enough yet with how NSI works internally to contribute anything there, but it’s absolutely something that needs to be worked out. I’m in contact with the operator of the DeFlock website and the community around it and we’ve discussed a bit how this might be worked out. In addition to the NSI issue another idea that’s been floated is proposing an ALPR iD preset, because as it stands there’s just the surveillance camera preset and the generic surveillance preset.
I’ve been talking with the website operator, I can approach them about this. Wikidata probably needs more explanation, yeah. As far as people thinking they need to include the parentheses, I’m not 100% sure how that could be presented more clearly. Maybe explicitly mention to remove them when you replace that text with the specific name?
This strange tagging is still reappearing:
And I noticed much more of these while cleaning up wikidata-tags:
Did you have any luck with that? At least one other person tried contacting the website too but without a response:
Yes, they said they’ll try to rework the instructions to make it clearer not to add the parentheses, and possibly move the mention of Wikidata into a separate part entirely with more explanation.
For reference, DeFlock does have a Discord server which is how I’ve been in contact with the community and the site owner. They’re decently responsive there. Maybe email is more hit or miss.