Hi, can somebody help and give advice how to adress these suspicous edits:
- changes tagged with a hotosm tag that is not appropriate to the location
- people with little experience doing changes in different parts of the world, that are fantasy / slight geomerty change / bad tagging
- (some contacted through changeset comments, but not responded)
- most changes needed to be be reverted (by individual changes or e.g. Changeset: 112859907 | OpenStreetMap)
Changesets by Haimanti PChowdhury | OpenStreetMap (all wrong, different parts of the world)
Changesets by MartyTheZebra | OpenStreetMap (not related to hotosm tag, some unuseful changes, but also helpful changes islolated_dwelling > building)
Changesets by JClaireD | OpenStreetMap (mostly wrong)
Changesets by Jerome Deloix | OpenStreetMap (all wrongly tagged)
Changesets by mairfan99 | OpenStreetMap (bad geometry)
What can we do as a community in such case? How can we mitigate this?
- there is no help of blocking these people, also not to auto-revert (based on what). Any other way to make such bad changes more visible? It seems not to be a single case unfortunately, but a pattern.
- could hotosm be asked to make sure edits with can only be done in the region the tag applies to and must be validated?
Yes, they are 2-3 years old.
You are right with all your suggestions to stay positive and help. I know that this is a community project and everybody starts small (even though I tend to forget, so thanks for reminding me).
It was just irritating me, that when I stumbled across one of these and then looking around in the area I immediately found other “poor edits” around and was wondering why they were still around and if we could somehow prevent this from happening without requiring volunteers to come across this by chance and then needing to spend quite some time to communicate and/or clean up the after fact.
Things could imagine would be e.g.
- editors to warn users when they are trying to create unusually small or big areas like small isolated dwellings, big parking lots, …
- in hotosm require tags to define a boundary and have editors warn users that try to create edits out of this boundary
- have editors warn users that create a certain amount of not squared buildings und tell them how to do it
But I would be interested in hearing, what may have been already tried, thought about or what could really help. Thank you
Looking at these one at a time:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/118332979 was two years ago and the user has not been active since. Likely the level of training that this new user was given by whoever asked them to edit OSM was inadequate, but as it was two years ago there is little we can do now.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/MartyTheZebra was similar, last edit 2 years ago.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/JClaireD was similar, last edit 2 years ago.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Jerome%20Deloix was similar, last edit 3 years ago.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/mairfan99 was similar, last edit 4 years ago.
What can we do as a community in such case? How can we mitigate this?
With historical data such as that listed above, all we can do as a community is tidy up afterwards. However, with more current problems, I’d suggest:
- Comment on new mappers’ changesets and do as suggested here. All new mappers make mistakes, so always try and stay positive - explain what they need to do to avoid creating future issues, and don’t use a changeset comment tool that marks things as “BAD”.
- Try and find out who’s supposed to be teaching them what to do and approach that person with how they can improve their teaching.**
- Look at the tasks that new mappers are being given to do and if the instructions are poor quality or wrong, contact the person who created the task on the tasking manager. .
- If communication fails at any point email the DWG via data@openstreetmap.org so that we can help bring problems to people’s attention. The tasking manager userid will match the OSM userid; we can and have blocked HOT task creators because they could not be bothered to respond to other people about the poor quality work they were causing new mappers to do.
There are various ways that you you could find potentially iffy edits - changesets with lots of unanswered comments and changesets with no actual words but only hashtag gibberish are a couple of obvious ones. Massive changesets are another; and you also mentioned changesets with a descripton that does not match the location.
** this can be tricky and often is a completely different person to whoever created e.g. a HOT tasking manager task.