Licence redaction begins this week

General talk
1

See this posting for details.

2

An update:

Dear All,

Summary: Please stop Imports, Automated Edits, Bulk edits & Bots until
the redaction process has ended.

The redaction bot has just started running. Until the redaction
process has been completed please suspend all imports and bulk edit
operations. Imports or bots which ignore this request may be subject
to an immediate temporary account block to ease up load on the API and
database servers.

Normal editing operations should be unaffected although I would
recommend saving often.

If you have any questions or a pressing need for such an edit please
contact the sysadmins in advance on IRC. See #osm-dev on OFTC via
http://irc.openstreetmap.org/

Grant
on behalf of OpenStreetMap Sysadmins

3

This is not OK. I didn’t login on OSM from some months and now all my data provided from many yers disappered in one day !!! THANKS OSM!!!
You could send at list some email with some info !!!

4

We did send several emails to those mappers who didn’t agree to the license. But your situation is different because you have agreed to the new license two years ago!

So I’m surprised that you say that all your data was deleted. Sometimes data will be deleted because someone else has also edited it and did not agree to the license change. But this would normally only affect a small part of your data, not all. So was actually all of your data deleted or only some of it? Maybe there was some kind of error?

I’m also surprised that you say you have contributed for 5 years, but your oldest edit listed is from 2010. Did you use a different account in the past?

I’m trying to understand what has happened here.

5

Hey there,

Ok I checked it again and trurly speaking YES some of my data were removed but not all. Still a lot of my data was removed. Is there any was to download whole my data what I provided till now? (including the removed one).

6

Older Planet.osm files will remain available under the CC BY-SA license with all data contributed until that point in time.

7

Hello there,

I wasn’t mapping since about 1-2 months and I now also noticed quite some changes of the “OSMF Redaction Account” in my area. When I select my whole town in JOSM I see that 24 objects have the bot as an author in it - but I got no idea how much data was actually deleted. There are also nonsensical nodes that have no tags - also created by the bot.

The worst of it all is that I noticed that some streets and even a shopping mall have been deleted for a large part or wholly :open_mouth:

I am not sure what’s the sense of this bot - does it only delete stuff of people who disagreed to the new license scheme or are these simple mistakes? I did not agree or disagree to the license stuff since I was on holiday and I also don’t think the bot wanted to delete my data (about 60% of the town’s data has me as an author in it). Thanks in advance for answers

PS: wouldn’t it be possible to review every step of the bot manually and reverse wrong ones step by step? I would like to do this for my area in lower austria, but I have never done anything with changesets or anti-vandalism programs before

8

You already agreed on the new license according to your profile.

To see which objects were changed by the redaction bot you can use the OSMI redaction bot view, explanations about the colors can be found here. So far there haven’t been any real mistakes by the bot, so it is very unlikely that there are any in your area. But you can still use the redaction bot view to ‘review’ the bot’s changes.

9

Presumably ‘mistake’ in this case means data removed when the author had agreed to the new license. There are a few redactions in my area that presumably were mapped by someone who had not agreed the change. Some represent features that are correct on the ground. I assume that I can remap them from first principles, ignoring the redacted data.

10

Ok, it seems to me that the problem is someone who did not accept the new license and that his data (altough correct) was deleted. The weird thing is that, for example, part of a shopping mall that I also edited is gone, but the part of it (the same polygon) which I had also edited is still there…

The only thing I am still wondering about is, how could I find out if it is not some other user’s fault? In the case of the “destroyed” mall I see in the inspector, that the building was “edited” by the redaction bot. But how could I ever find out about objects that were simply deleted, how can I find out “what” made it disappear (like the street in front of my house) when I am not able to view it in JOSM?

11

If objects were totally deleted by the Redaction Bot, then they are displayed in the RedactionBot-view of OSM-Inspector in red.

Can you see this?

If you (or anyone else) recreated an object by your own knowlwdge (and not derived from “old” OSM data!) you can choose the red marked object so that its details are displayed on the right. Click the trashcan icon there and the red marked way turns into a green one. Thus you can see where objects still have to be remapped.

Stephan

12

Thanks, I think I now I got it. When I select the objects deleted by the bot, the description of them says “Do not copy this information to OpenStreetMap as it is CC-BY-SA licensed only!”.

I think it is a pity tough that I cannot simply undo changes by the bot when I clearly know that the information is correct and that I have to redraw everything…

Adding to this hassle are many edits of the bot that leaves ways and objects on the map, but without any tags. How is it possible to repair this? I’ve got a feeling the bot is damaging the database quality severly, what can I do?

13

First of all: Don’t panic! 7 years ago the whole map was blank. It would have been easier to ‘rescue’ data, if you had done it before the redaction bot passed by. It was announced that this was going to happen several months ago.

So, how to repair after the fact. JOSM has a validator which helps a lot to find orphaned nodes and problems with the geometry.

Geofabrik has several layers and tools:

http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/debug.html?view=redactionbot&lon=4.28174&lat=52.16989&zoom=6&overlays=overview,bot_point_cleared,bot_point_superseded,bot_line_cleared,bot_line_superseded,bot_point_modified,bot_line_modified_cp,bot_line_modified,bot_point_deleted,bot_line_deleted_cp,bot_line_deleted

There are several other layers to help you find problems.

The best thing to do is to readd what you know yourself in your neighbourhood. You can have a look at the redactionbot view and add what you ‘would have’ known as well. But that’s a slippery slope…

Normally it will be corrected in due course anyway. So it looks like a major act of vandalism, but you can’t bake an omelet without breaking eggs.

I, for one, am glad that this finally happened. Now, at least we can map again without fear of the foundation being pulled out from under us. What probably happened is that people added information on items created or touched by people who didn’t agree to the CTs and then those subsequent edit disappeared with all the rest.
At least we know that the info that gets added now, isn’t at risk from that side anymore.

Cheers,

Polyglot