Organised Editing/Activities/Trziste prace

Communities Österreich (Austria)
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Hallo, seit einigen Tagen fallen mir vermehrt Änderungen von neuen Benutzern auf, die massenhaft Webseiten von Hotels und Unterkünften hinzufügen. Dabei werden ausschließlich die Domains https://tripingguide.com oder https://hotel-details-guide.com verwendet. Eine andere Domain ist https://katestravelexperience.eu.

Heute habe ich mir die in Vorarlberg bearbeiteten Objekte genauer angesehen. 95% hatten eine eigene Webseite, die aber nicht eingetragen war - sondern eine URL mit einer der oben genannten Domains. Bei 3% gab es einfach keine Website und bei ca. 2% existierte das Hotel nicht mehr.

Die Daten wurden alle über MapComplete eingetragen, vermutlich um einen Massenimport zu verschleiern.

Wir reden hier mittlerweile von über 5000 Einträgen, größtenteils in Österreich. Overpass-Abfrage weltweit gibt’s hier. Der “Buchen”-Button auf den Webseiten verlinkt auf booking.com inklusive einem Affiliate-Link zum Geld verdienen.

Es gibt übrigens eine Wiki-Seite zum organisierten Mapping hier.

Das Ganze scheint mir ein sehr gut getarnter Massenimport einer Werbefirma zu sein. In der Zwischenzeit werde ich zumindest alle Änderungen, die auch Vorarlberg betreffen, komplett rückgängig machen. Was haltet ihr vom Rest?
Sollte die DWG für einen kompletten Block und Revert konsultiert werden?

Ping an @Pieter_Vander_Vennet da er sogar in der Wiki-Seite erwähnt wird.

I hope you can have the post translated with DeepL or the forum software. Are you involved in the Mass-Edit described above? Is this valid data or is MapComplete being misused here to store masses of affiliate URLs?

@woodpeck Darf ich dich hier auch kurz involvieren? Was denkst du dazu? Ich musste auch gerade sehr lachen, als ich auf der Wiki-Seite las:

As the involved mappers are novices, they were not aware of the organized editing guidelines (and it might be argued that the scale and nature of the editing is small enough to not need them, see below). As this is not an import, the Import guidelines are not needed as well.

Sowie die Überschrift “Adding hotels (hobby project)”

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Bei ein paar Stichproben hat das schon einen eher bitteren Beigeschmack:

  • POIs werden einfach über bestehende und getaggte “drüber” gelegt
  • alles (auch Leut, die zeitweise ein(!) Zimmer vermieten) wird als “hotel” getagged
  • unabhängig von der “echten” Website der Firmen werden immer die o.g. verwendet, obwohl die Angebote dort auch bei anderen zu haben sind (eigene Webseite, booking.com airbnb etc.)
  • im dicht verbauten Gebiet sind die Dinger auch nicht sehr lagenttreu und oft ein oder mehrere Häuser daneben

Kroatien hab ich nicht angesehen, aber in Österreich und in Island ist es mE Spam (und das vorsätzlich) und sollte als solcher behandelt werden.

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Hi all,

I don’t speak German but was indeed able to follow along with machine translations.

Those edits came to my attention two weeks ago, because I check edits made with MapComplete every now and then. I too was very suspicious - especially because they uploaded pictures from booking.com to ““openstreetmap””. (I’m using double quotes because the images actually go to IMGUR, but that is not visible when using MapComplete).

I see it (a bit) as my duty to guide people using my tools, which is why I pointed them towards the organized editing principles and setup a wiki page about this endeavour. I was aware that they added hundreds of points, but I have to admit that I’m surprised by the sheer scale of their edits (reaching 1700 points). I retracted the " (and it might be argued that the scale and nature of the editing is small enough to not need them, see below)" part on the wiki page…

I’m not involved with their organisation. However, I also get reports of failed edits, and since a few weeks I apply those manually; so some of those hotels were added by me.

alles (auch Leut, die zeitweise ein(!) Zimmer vermieten) wird als “hotel” getagged

Up till a few days ago, MapComplete only showed hotels and was able to add those. They indeed added some B&B’s as ““hotel”” with “Bed and Breakfast” in the table. I’ve since updated MC to also show B&Bs, hostels, motels, … so this should improve their work.

Furthermore, I’ve also added a warning when adding a website from tripingguide, hotel-details, tripadvisor, booking.com to prefer the official website of the feature, but to no avail it seems.

Up till now, I was assuming good faith and enthusiastic rookie mistakes, but there were some weird things going on as well. The sheer size of the endeavour for one, and the fact that they are a company doing exactly this kind of work. And one one hand, they are claiming that “they visited all those hotels”. If all of the involved mappers visited a different hotel, they should have been visiting hotels for 190 days each in the past few years. Not impossible, but also quite improbable.

Another problem in the communication was that they claim there is no copying involved

Yes, I can confirm that we did not just copy any information of any website you’ve mentioned - source: Changeset: 155000674 | OpenStreetMap

However, in some personal messages a few days ago, they are talking about “a dataset they are using”. I pointed them to the import guidelines and they promised me to make a post on the community forum about this, but I haven’t seen this up to now. I will publish this private communication in a next post.

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For context: we had a quite some messages bouncing and had a short video meeting the 12th of august where I pointed towards some basic OSM tools.

So, the most relevant (and recent emails) for this discussion are:

On 19/08/2024 14:12, Petr [family name redacted for privacy] wrote:

Hey, Pieter,

how are you?

I have a topic I would like to touch base on with you, if you don’t mind – so we continue to add and update places on OSM but, as could’ve been expected, work and holiday interfere with that quite a bit. Some people did not have time to make a single update in the past week at all, but we’ve had couple other coworkers join in the effort.

Anyway… at this pace I am really worried we will have the information outdated before we can add a meaningful amount into OSM. (We do update our data, but it’s not a constant process and we do it only once in X months).

Thus I am thinking about bringing some of the freelancers we work with into the effort. I think this should be discussed as we would actually pay these people to verify and update the information and I want to make sure it would not go against OSM’s guidelines in any way. We would brief them, guide them base on our experience so far and we would monitor their behaviour, so I am not worried about a difference in quality of changes made. But still I would like to hear your opinion whether such behaviour would be acceptable or whether it simply is too much.

Thank you,

Petr

My answer

Hi,

First of all, I really appreciate the effort you are putting in. It is great to see so much enthusiasm!

However, I don’t understand why you are rushing so much. Two months ago, none of you had any meaningful contributions to OpenStreetMap - yet now you are adding hotel data as if you lives depend on it… Why is that?

For context, OpenStreetMap has just celebrated its 20th birthday. While having the hotel data will indeed open up some more use cases and make it more useable for some people, going a bit slower won’t hurt the project as well.

Furthermore, I’d also recommend to take some time to learn more about the wider OSM-ecosystem and community. Try some of the other thematic maps on MapComplete. Try a few of the other pieces of software used to edit OSM or some of the quality assurance tools. Learn about some of the OSM principles, such as the good practices, such as not tagging for the renderer or via the beginners guide.
And most importantly, get in touch with other people involved with OSM - especially from your area.

At last, I’m only the toolmaker. Of course, the tool (MapComplete) will partly shape the data that is created with it. However, your endeavour to bring in lots of hotel data is wider then just this tool (as it can be done with e.g. iD or JOSM as well - which might be more suited).
This is why you need to discuss this with people whom you are impacting, thus the people from the areas where you add hotels.

As you are thus expanding the scope even more, you will have to write a post on https://community.openstreetmap.org/ where you explain what you do, how you approach this and where all your data is coming from. And yes, quite some work in OpenStreetMap is not actually mapping, but learning, explaining others what you are doing or getting the data model right.

Kind regards,
Pietervdvn

The response: (21th aug, 12:08)

Hi, Pieter,

thank you for getting back to me regarding this.

The “rush”, if you want to call it that way, has two main reasons: 1/ we have energy to focus on this right now and I see this very likely to diminish over the course of several months as other paid projects kick in. And, more importantly, 2/ right now we have recent verified data and the longer it takes us to add them to the map, the more likely it is they will become obsolete. At this moment I am not sure when we will do another update and on what scale it would be.

I’ve simply asked you as, well, I have your email and also as you are a skilled member of the community so your opinion is valid and important.

However as you suggest, I will discuss doing this with the community.

Thank you,

Petr

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Next steps: I’m gonna notify them of this community post, so that they get a chance to explain their actions. I leave it up to your judgement if a revert is needed.

I can also change mapcomplete so that it won’'t accept trippingguide (and similar) as website anymore. If this is really a spam campaign, then they would need to use different editor software (and it won’t be my responsability anymore, as they aren’t using MapComplete then). @mcliquid Let me know if you think this is necessary and I’ll implement this.

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Sofort komplett revertieren, wäre meine Antwort. Hatte neulich eine ganz
ähnliche Situatio mit einem Mapper aus Russland, der überall Hotels mit
Links zu “ourhotel.store” hinzugefügt hat.

Selbst wenn die Platzierungen korrekt und nicht dupliziert wären, so
wären Links zu Drittplattformen niemals in Ordnung und Affiliate-Links
auf Booking.com schon gleich gar nicht.

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Als Referenz, hier eine aktuelle Konversation: Changeset: 155621525 | OpenStreetMap

@woodpeck Sollte ich dazu ein DWG Ticket erstellen?

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In the meantime I’ve actually blocked using those websites as link. When their caches expire (which can take a while), they won’t be able to use MapComplete anymore to add links to trippingguide, booking.com, tripadvisors and some others.

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PS: This OSMCha query shows all edits made with the hotel-theme the past 31 days. You should be able to find all involved people here (and on the linked wiki page)

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Hello,

my name is Petr and I am a managing director at Trziste prace. Let me share a bit of context for this activity.

Yes, we are a data collection and processing firm, that is true and it would be a lie to say otherwise. No, us both as a business or as individuals are not commercially interested in this activity. You may not believeit, but it is what it is.

Over a year ago we were contracted by an international hotel reservation company for several projects, one of them was to provide a quality-based analysis of some of their affiliate partners, another to provide business leads. Combined outcome of this (and some other) projects was a comprehensive up to date database of accommodations in specific locals. And to answer your question - yes we (that is either our core team or workers we contract all around the world) did visit all the locations included in the dataset. It may seem improbable, but this is what we do - we gather data wherever it is needed.

One of my colleagues came accross OSM about 2 months ago. It seemed like a nice idea, we’ve discussed with the client whether we can try to update the map with the given information and were given a green light to use the data we have collected. It was agreed to link we could use website links for affiliate partners we have helped to verify that contain current and up to date information.

We’ve started working on this in our spare time, first three of us and later other co-workers joined. It’s summer, we don’t have that many projects going on and this seemed as a nice activity. As I’ve mentioned to Pieter earlier this week, I like this activity but I think that our time commitment to it will decrease as September comes and we will have to start focus on our commercial activities again.

I am very much open to constructive criticism of our work and welcome any help I can get. If you feel that our work is crap then please go ahead and revert those changes. As I’ve mentioned earlier - neither myself, nor the company, nor anybody within the company have financial interest in this activity so all that would be wasted is just some time. And I can live with that.

Thank you,
Petr

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As a first step I have now reverted all edits from users “Milan Kasal”, “Jan Fekete”, “Andrea Rory”, “Trziste prace”, “Lawrence Okello (Trziste prace)”, and “Pedro Holbe”, where the objects had not been modified by someone else afterwards. Sadly, while having good intentions, Pieter has “half repaired” a number of things e.g. Node History: 12099714606 | OpenStreetMap where he removed some image URLs but left the “trippingguide” link in place. I’ll go over those in a second iteration later.

(I have not blocked the accounts because I trust @Petr_Svec to relay the message that this type of editing should not be continued.)

(Edit - removed those 41 hotels that were added by the Trziste prace team and where Pieter left a 3rd party link in place.)

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Btw., I noticed that years ago a similar problem led to blocks and reverts, martinmatejek blocked by woodpeck | OpenStreetMap and Trziste prace blocked by woodpeck | OpenStreetMap - back then it was apparently “hoteldetail.eu” links. Given that the account “Trziste prace” was involved at the time, the company must have one hell of an employee turnaround if “One of my colleagues came accross OSM about 2 months ago” is true! @Petr_Svec I hope that you will educate your colleagues so that we don’t have them “coming across OSM” afresh in three years and starting to add links to hotel booking sites.

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Hello,

I respect your decision even though I obviously see things different way.

When you have decided to revert all the changes instead of only removing the submitted website links, you have also reverted dozens of other changes (wrong name, wrong placement, wrong phone number or not working website). I don’t see how this is benefitial to the OSM. I guess there are constructive and desctructive ways to solve situations and this was an example of the latter.

You can go ahead and block those user accounts as I don’t think that any of us have any intention in making any new contributions knowing any mistake or misunderstanding is solved this way.

Also I am not going to “educate” anyone. But I will share this experience to anyone interested in contributing to OSM.

I wish you the best of luck in your effort.

Best regards,
Petr