Dear Ukraine community,
after user avinet_ua recently automatically added lots of Ukrainian names to places in Europe and was blocked (avinet_ua blocked by SomeoneElse | OpenStreetMap), avinet_ua created a number of secondary accounts that were used to create vandalism that smeared my DWG colleague Andy Townsend. This vandalism damaged the map in many parts of Europe and led to consternation among many OSM users (see The "OSM Standard tile layer" looks wrong (white lines, abusive comments etc.)).
The accounts performing the vandalism have been blocked and the vandalism has been reverted. However, avinet_ua has meanwhile created a number of further accounts with whom they try to participate in OSM. According to DWG investigation, the accounts heroivn, swek01, gogeminist, lekman100 and mikel30 have all been created in a similar way as the avinet_ua vandalism accounts. (There might be more we have not discovered yet.)
These accounts have not yet performed any vandalism but they are all preoccupied with somehow adding Ukrainian names (even to objects in Ukraine that until now had a single name tag a name:uk will be added) and/or adding Ukrainian Wikipedia links and so on.
These accounts violate the rule that you shouldn’t create additional accounts when your main account is blocked; and obviously, they all belong to a person who has proven that they are willing to damage OSM and spread hate if they don’t get what they want. Also, it appears that some of these accounts are even used to mislead forum readers by “discussing” things with each other here on the forum.
What should we do about these accounts? Should we block them all, including any further avinet_ua clones that are created in the future? The DWG would probably need the support of the Ukrainian community for spotting new accounts doing the old things. Or should we block these secondary accounts and allow avinet_ua to continue contributing with their original account, under the obligation that they stop creating sock puppets?
In my opinion, avinet_ua and all their secondary accounts (and any accounts they may create in the future) should be kicked out of OSM because they have proven that they are willing to damage OSM and abuse the map to attack people, and it will likely happen again in the future if they are allowed to contribute.
But I am eager to hear the opinion of the Ukrainian community, since avinet_ua claims to fight for what they believe to be the Ukrainian cause…
(You can reply in Ukrainian, I will use the forum translation feature to read it.)
Greetings
Frederik (DWG member)
