How many standards does the DWG use?

General talk
11

You don’t mention details, like the changesets you reported, @SomeoneElse does not mention your ticket numbers, so we don’t know what you and @SomeoneElse are referring to, nor can look up the DWG quarterly reports to see mention of those tickets.

This is an interesting point. Have you considered merging issues, allowing all reporters to be notified, to know of each other? Or going public with reports, so that we can avoid mentioning issues multiple times, or follow issues of our concern without having to bother the already overworked DWG.

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12

We routinely merge issues internally but we treat reports confidentially so we will not tell person A that “person B has also complained about the same thing”. For the same reason we don’t make reports public but sometimes complainants do that themselves, by writing a public changeset comment saying “I have reported this to the DWG”.

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13

While I didn’t myself (not yet), one reason I could imagine to block private messages on this discourse is being continuously called in private whenever someone’s go here complaining about activities which happens in Global South related to the incorporation that sponsored the setup of this new forum. Even if public are valid becauses still under good practices (such as protect copyright infringement) under interests of OSMF, anything that can be censored based distorted view on the Etiquette to move the complaint from the action as and deal as if was personal attack, it does happens as misuse of Etiquette.

So, the approach of blocking private messages on discourse forces what would be private discussion moves either for public in the forum or via email, both which can be exposed if power is abused for things obviously skewed. So this alone disincentives spurious comments, because having the guts to say it out loud can easily backfire.

So yes, the fact that push for public discussions escalated works as self moderating for power abuse.

PS.: my comment doesn’t imply opinion on how DWG worked on this or other cases. I actually think that group cases/complaints can be mostly operational, and deciding to not take action when unsure can be a better approach.

14

I think we’re loosing our focus, which was on the way the DWG intervenes in similar cases.

while we’re drifting:

I’m not aware I’m doing this. maybe it has to do with your hidden profile? anyhow, I’m happy you have written in public your reminder to the CoC, because it gives me the opportunity to mention that I completely disagree on how you read the CoC.

maybe you want to check this with each other?

back to my points of concern:

  • why were our complaints about @joserrg12 in Nicaragua and Costa Rica without effect?
  • why was @joserrg12 blocked for 6 months after the changesets mentioned in block 6360?
  • how was the lack of response by @BigKev97 accepted?
    (On the 3rd of December he did comment to some changesets but he still hasn’t provided much information to all the questions we posed: “Sorry”, “Sources”, “Perdon”, “Gracias” … And he’s now limiting his action to Puerto Rico.)
  • any hints on how I can convince @Alvarado2510 to accept hints and, for example, stop handling QA warnings as reasons to delete or mess up our information?
  • does the DWG need any help to handle the excessive work at hand? I offered a couple of times, and did not get any reply. I’d be fine with a public “Thank you, but no thank you”.

as a later addition:

  • from whom, why, under which conditions, do we allow copying from other maps? (the interested reader can look for Ticket 2023011510000024 in future DWG reports.)
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15

I am looking over the list of processed tickets for q1 and q2 2022
and seemingly a plurality are for Europe and the United States. This may be the result of the fact that these countries have more active members or larger communities on the whole, so more tickets may be issued for Europe in any given year for example. Alternatively, the frequency or lack of of DWG action for certain areas may be a little reflective of the geographic composition of the group? This is no fault of the members of the DWG. I know for a fact that I myself would subconsciously pay more attention to tickets for Brazil and United States, because of my personal history with these countries. Maybe the recruitment of more people who live in South and Central america is in order.

16

an earlier example of ›from whom, why, under which conditions, do we allow copying from other maps?‹, take ticket#2021021810000146, which was handled done in 2021Q4 as No action needed.

the report went:

[right, let’s assume you do not have the time for handling @joserrg12.] the other issue is much more serious, because the guy, @Alvarado2510, has:

  1. mentioned his sources (the IGNTG)
  2. understood this is not legal
  3. started confusing the waters, to keep copying.
    (spreading his edits focusing on administrative borders over dozens of changesets, first the natural entities, wait a couple of days, a week, then using them in the relations, or doing massive questionable contributions like this one in the meanwhile.)
  4. been blocked in several occasions
  5. understood that he can simply ignore the blocks

Over the years I’ve commented on some of such changesets, with no reply, not even empty ones. 124791271, 124790622, 109829248, 102087839, 87736247

I’m not able to understand “No action needed”.

p.s.: I am mentioning people by name to give them the opportunity to intervene, and I’ve invited to this platforms all people I’m mentioning.

17

@DWG: As a random OSM contributor who stumbled across this thread, I would like to understand why the DWG’s official resolution to a user who acknowledges he’s copying from copyrighted sources is “No action needed” in the DWG Quarterly report. That doesn’t match at all the understanding of OpenStreetMap importing guidelines that we encourage in any of the communication channels I frequent (this forum, the wiki, the subreddit, Telegram groups, …), and sounds legally fishy.

Especially in such a clear-cut case as the one presented by @mariotomo. The mapper admits that they used a source which the Panamá wiki pages point out as an example of an invalid source due to copyright (see the how NOT to map section in the Panamá wiki pages).

Could DWG deliberations and reasoned decisions about every closed ticket become public in full detail? Either at the time of closing, or at least some time later after a cool-down period.

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18

So in this whole thread - I still miss the answer by DWG about the question by the OP!

The OP clearly shows examples of DWG handling users by different standards.

One of these standards is a user clearly admitting to use non-compatible sources to contribute to OSM and DWG stating:“no action needed”

So the OP clearly asks:“how many standards are there and how do we know when they apply to whom?”

DWG, your move…

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19

Where there are numerous complaints from one person, the DWG cannot always deal with every case - some things we have to hand back to the community. Sometimes it is one word against another and in some cases the overall issue is not important enough to spend a lot of time on it. Mario has a history of requiring a lot of attention from other mappers in the region and elsewhere, and also from the DWG.

The DWG needs to be a place of last resort, where the community goes for help if they cannot solve an issue themselves. I do not want to enter a tit-for-tat here with Mario but the issues he brought to our attention were frequently issues that other people seemed less concerned about, and sometimes they were reported to us without enough specific detail to be able to be followed up.

Then, when Mario did not get the attention he thought his issue deserved, he would inquire about the status of his complaint, or write in different languages, or request that his ticket be handled by a different DWG agent because he was unhappy with the situation. In some situations Mario would ask friends of his who until that time had never so much as commented on a changeset to suddenly pop up at DWG and support his issues, or claim to be a random OSM contributor who just stumbled across this of all issues and want to know the status.

In the ticket above from which Mario quoted a part of his complaint, he also spent many words telling us about his personal mood on that particular day and went on: “If you still think we don’t understand each other, we can try as said chatting, or please handle the issue to a Dutch person, or Italian, or Russian, preferably a mathematician, thank you.”

The ticket (which actually is a complaint about 2 mappers) looks “solid” at first with five references, but three of them are to a private Telegram group, one is to a changeset that actually deals with editing offsets and not with copying from bad sources, and one is a link to simply one of those users’ block list.

Despite what was suggested in this ticket, there is no direct evidence that we could follow up that would bolster Mario’s accusations, and this is exactly what happened time and time again - the DWG receives a lengthy missive from Mario with an accusation that may or may not be valid that doesn’t provide solid evidence, and leaves the DWG to try to get to the bottom of the story by other means.

DWG communications with Mario have been so unfruitful over the years (and the evidence is that other mappers find him as difficult to interact with as we do) that whenever Mario complains that someone is misbehaving we now assume that Mario might also be a part of the problem, and view his complaint with at least a grain of salt.

Sometimes when more evidence is forthcoming from elsewhere we can proceed - it is worth noting that one of the two users mentioned in the complaint is at present blocked pending a reply from them about edits elsewhere.

The number of statuses that the DWG has for closing tickets is finite and the “no action necessary” is perhaps a little bit of a misnomer here; it should have been “no immediately actionable evidence supplied, and the complainant has exceeded the amount of attention we can spend on them”. I think we may have to revisit how we publish quarterly summaries in order not to mislead anyone. We will certainly not publish internal deliberations about the handling of tickets - most of what we do is public anyway (changeset comments, block messages, etc.), and unless people abuse our patience they will usually also receive messages when we decide not to do something.

This is actually something that I personally told Mario years ago - that the DWG cannot act as his personal OSM grief councellor. His take-away from that was apparently that the DWG must be overworked, as has been claimed in this thread.

I don’t believe that this is the case - I think that we have about the right balance of people for the workload - but we still have to be economical with our time.

Which is why I will not continue this discussion here - once again, Mario has managed
to consume DWG time that could have been better spent on other work.

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20

Can we eventually have a public, official, serious reply from Data Working Group which don’t use argumentum ad hominem as part of the reasoning?

When argumentation against decisions from DWG are minimally solid or better (using what applies to other cases; how mappers are encouraged to take care in their regions), then leave impression focusing not is the idea, but the person who argue the idea, then it would require others who unsure about what to think that they’re would need to agree that argumentum ad hominem is valid at all. In other words, makes no sense because instead of respond the arguments, appeal by evading with attack to the person to unlegimilize the argument is fallacious counter-argument.

I’m sure you from DWG can do better explanation than appeal to obvious fallacies. No matter how annoyed you might be, this approach is very unstable.

21

@fititnt, I mean this with all politeness as I say this: I don’t know if English is your native language, but it is mine. Perhaps you are using translation software, in which case, I strongly recommend you find something more effective. I find nearly all of the several (dozen?) of your (usually quite lengthy) posts here to be almost impossible to parse as I read them as a native English speaker, and I am quite well-educated (with a double-major in Linguistics from the University of California) and am multilingual across five languages (to some degree). I usually get your tone coming across loud and clear, more often than not this seems inflammatory or even hostile and/or overtly colored with needless complexity.

Perhaps you might aim for more succinct, simply-worded missives? Thank you for this consideration.

Postscript: I do know what argument ad hominem is (Latin for a particular kind of argument against the person, not the topic. And I don’t think this is what @woodpeck did above).

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22

I assume (and hope!) this is a top priority for the regular operation of the DWG. Isn’t it?

In the particular case I refer in my post above, the DWG would have tried to obtain directly from the reported mapper a statement on which sources were used maybe? And if there was no answer in a reasonable time, then take active measures to prevent further possible copyright infringement on the basis of reasonable suspicion. OSM is a community project; a mapper who does not provide their sources is already a burden on the community.

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23

I might be taking 2+2 and getting 5, but I’m a bit puzzled by the mathematician thing…?

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24

I didn’t deal with that particular ticket, but I’ve checked and that is literally a direct quote from the text of the ticket that Mario logged.

We have had odder requests. This isn’t one of those cases, but we get lots of complaints where someone has seen “(c) OpenStreetMap Contributors” on a map on a web page and decides to complain to us about that web page, often from someone who doesn’t understand how phone apps, the internet, or computers in general work. Where there’s some information to go on we try and help where we can (usually by suggesting who the complainant should contact) but quite often there is literally nothing we can do.

25

Hi,

Can we eventually have a public, official, serious reply from Data
Working Group which don’t use argumentum ad hominem as part of the
reasoning?

Assuming for a moment that you mistakenly used the term “ad hominem” to
mean “having to do with a person”:

To get an answer that does not have anything to do with a person, you
need to ask a question that does not have anything to do with a person.

The public, official, serious reply to the question “can you use
copyrighted sources to contribute to OSM” is “no”. This is the only
“standard” there is, and the DWG is happy to re-iterate that to anyone
asking. As I only recently in a Panama-related discussion, here:
Rutas de MetroBus en Panama - #46 by woodpeck.

In everyday DWG work, a case cannot be separated from the history of
both the person reporting someone and the person whose behaviour is
reported. The DWG will always look at (or remember) potential past
interactions and they will inform how a case is dealt with. A “repeat
offender” will be blocked more quickly than someone who makes a mistake
for the first time. A year-long feud between two mappers who accuse each
other of wrongdoing might receive less attention than a report by
someone who has a history of making factual and well-researched cases,
and so on.

So, “how many standards does the DWG use”? - There are rules that
everyone is expected to adhere to. But how exactly these will be applied
is a case-by-case decision. There are as many “standards” as there are
cases.

Bye
Frederik

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26

I’m not sure I understood.

My reports are being ignored because … ?

27

See:

Emphasis mine.

In my interactions with the DWG over the years, I’ve always found them to be professional and courteous, which is impressive considering the amount of stupid that they have to deal with on a daily basis. While I’m not familiar with the particular case here, it’s clear that you tend to communicate in a confrontational and accusing manner, and that is the main reason why people aren’t interested in hearing what you have to say.

The discussion here has striking parallels with other cases where someone just couldn’t get along with other mappers. Your name seems to consistently come up in the context of “problems in the LATAM mapping community”, and not in a good way. Why is that?

OpenStreetMap isn’t for everyone, and perhaps you should consider whether this project is a good fit for you.

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28

so, as long as it’s only me reporting local people copying from whatever sources, these reports are going to be ignored.

this, combined with the local Latin American custom not to criticize under any circumstances, does mean that @BigKev97, @Alvarado2510, @joserrg12 and whoever likes to do so, may copy from whatever sources they please, as long as they stay within their non-criticizing community.

makes sense, thank you for your reading key @ZeLonewolf. it also matches why @joserrg12 was blocked when he transgressed the Latin American boundaries, and how @BigKev97 is now mapping undisturbed within the boundaries of Puerto Rico.

so dear @Alvarado2510, go ahead, Panama is all yours to mess up with!

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29

I do not think there is any value in leaving this thread open. I believe all main participants have shared their points, and at this juncture I do not believe any mutually satisfactory conclusion will be reached by the parties to this conversation. I am weary of the rising tension and therefore am closing this topic on 1/20.

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