Actually one more question - is there an RSS feed of “new challenges”?
Had it been immediately visible when it was added, a challenge whose entire description was “Replace diplomatic=high_commission with diplomatic=embassy + embassy=high_commission” (an obvious mechanical edit) could have been nipped in the bud.
Not currently. Interesting idea though.
Ticket for RSS feed opened, RSS feed for newly created discoverable challenges · Issue #1904 · maproulette/maproulette3 · GitHub Not currently scoped however.
An update, it is now possible to Flag (or “report”, still not sure what the best term is) challenges. A short blog post by the devs who implemented this is here.
That seems to have been closed without a fix actually happening?
What I wrote a few months ago still largely seems to be true - the UI is still very limited. There are the API links above of course, which should allow people to download the revevant data before analysing it manually. The bug that was open for this seems to have been closed without the issue being fixed though, or maybe it;s just not live yet?
Is there any documentation of what APIs there are?
If that is what passes for documentation these days then I am William Shakespeare 
What seems to be missing is the hiearchy of metadata. For people not familiar, could you briefly describe the Challenges, the projects, how they are related. Is there an instruction to list all challenges, all projects, plus geolocation and a brief description of these ?
All the conceptual stuff is explained in the end user documentation? Documentation | MapRoulette Docs. In my opinion it makes sense to use MapRoulette first before trying to access the API? There you will quickly discover the hierarchy of projects › challenges › tasks.
I’m using the API because it was suggested by the Maproulette author above. What I’d like to be able to do is to download a list of “challenges” that form part of a “project”, and then download a list of changesets that have been performed as a result of each challenge. I can get changeset data and metadata from the OSM API; but I don’t see a documented way of getting a list of changesets (without going through the code, of course).
For context, I’m a member of the Data Working Group, and we occasionally get reports of problematic challenges**. The Maproulette UI’s openness to outsiders is somewhat limited (see above in this thread), but the API appears that it might be an easier way to get at that data.
** we have 4 tickets open at the moment, of varying ages.
Is this feature handled by someone? No generated issue has been closed yet since February 3 (the three closed ones are tests).
MapRoulette and OSM are not integrated at this point. A user looks at a task in MapRoulette and locks it. They do the OSM edit normally in an editor and upload the changeset. OSM and the changeset don’t “know” anything about MapRoulette. There’s a suggested changeset comment, but users are of course free to change it – most don’t. And then you go back to MapRoulette to mark the task as completed. You could also submit several changesets for one task. Or none at all if you fixed the task already yesterday.
So there’s no direct way to find the changesets that came out of a challenge.
In the past what I’ve done is to get the contributors to a challenge and the days they were active. Then fetch all changesets of these users on the days they were active. And finally filter the changeset comments for the hashtags or URL MapRoulette proposes to put in the comment.
It’s a bit cumbersome to work with two disconnected APIs, but for me it worked well enough.
Here I created some contributor stats for a finished challenge, and evaluated the changesets this way: Ungemappte Wohngebiete in Deutschland anhand Zensus - #256 by hfs
Here’s the code I used to fetch the status of all tasks of all challenges in a project, using the Python MapRoulette Client library: landuse_without_buildings/13_challenge_status.py at master · hfs/landuse_without_buildings · GitHub
And here’s the code to correlate that with changesets of the contributors: landuse_without_buildings/14_mapper_stats.ipynb at master · hfs/landuse_without_buildings · GitHub
Maybe that helps?
Thanks for the documentation.
A maproulette hashtag is not sufficient. I prefer solution like for the HOT Tasking manager where the host key is added to the tags with information about the project + map/validate info (HOT Tasking Manager). MapRoulette and OSM could be better integrated providing details with the host key (example: https://maproulette.org/api/v2/challenge/77/nextTask/53906) . This would let the comment key for the osm contributor.
That’s a shame. Up til now I’ve been looking for changesets with a changeset comment that matches the suggested comment in maproulette. An example changeset is here, but that seem unrelated to the maproulette description, even though the comment mathes - presumably because “#fix-osmcha-detection #maproulette” matches lots of chllenges.
note that it works only when person creating MR thing decided to fill default changeset comment and people editing based on MR instructions have not deleted/replaced it
What is happening once challenge is flagged and report issue is created at github?
As far as I can see at Issues · maproulette/challenge-reports · GitHub reporting has no effect whatsoever.
At this moment it’s self-governing. The challenge maintainer gets an email with the github link to engage with the person who added the flag. From there on it’s a public discussion between the author and the flagger. If that does not work out there’s the Maproulette team (basically, me) and the DWG to mediate, but capacity of both is limited.
If people want to step up and help out with building a process and volunteer as “moderators” that would be great.
They get emails for challenge comments as well, and a flag usually arrives when comments are not addressed. If someone ignored the comments, will ignore the flag as well probably.
I think a solution could be to immediately make a challenge non-discoverable when flagged, if the creator wants it to be discoverable again, they have to finally address the discussion.
This is something we’re considering. Thanks for the suggestion.