Hi all.
There are two issues with streets in Odesa:
-
There were waves of vandalism where multiple profiles were removing
name:rutags (Місце російської мови на об'єктах на території України - #29 by woodpeck) and other people were restoring them, but sometimes other changes prevented the restore in the meantime (How about limit new accounts? - #233 by muchichka_s).The result is that there are streets whereI can’t find those anymore, so all of that must be the second cause: someone has removed them again (e.g. OSM history, OSM history, OSM history).name:ruwasn’t restored yet
Why is this important? There was no agreement that those names should be removed, there are still enough street nameboards with Russian names, and a lot of people continue to speak Russian (russia does not own the language). -
What’s worse is the active local street renames and people didn’t bother to preserve the old names (e.g. OSM history, OSM history), or they were purposefully (wrongly) removed (e.g. OSM history, OSM history). I restored those as
old_name:*on about a dozen of streets manually, which was slow and frustrating. So simply restoringname:ruisn’t possible anymore because that may be the old name now.
Why is this important? A lot of the nameboards won’t be updated soon (given previous experience in the city) and lots of people continue to use the “old” street names, so it’s great to be able to find them in OSM-based applications (I haven’t checked whether OsmAnd, Organic Maps, Nominatim can find them though).
I’m targeting only Odesa because I’m most familiar with it.
My vague ideas for a program to fix this:
- Load the entire osm history for the city (from a geofabrik extract) into a local sqlite db so that I don’t use the OSM API too much.
- Find all the streets (I think there are about 2500 streets (not OSM ways) in the city) existing now and compare their names with a previous point in time. That could be the beginning of the war (Feb 2022), but there were street name fixes in Aug 2023 (Напівавтоматичне приведення назв вулиць до стандарту «Uk:Адреси» - #41 by darkonus), so I’ll have to take that date as the reference.
- If
name(that is, in Ukrainian) is the same, make sure other names (such asname:ru) are the same and restore them if they are missing now. - If
nameis different, check thatold_name*s are present and match what used to be the names. - In case of unexpected/unmatching names, highlight them for a required manual review.
- Some street ways have been split since, so this method won’t work for new ways.
There will be no automatic uploads here. My program will generate .osm files and I will review the changes manually in JOSM before uploading. Ideally, the program should be idempotent so that rerunning it after fixing everything won’t produce any changes, but it’s probably not feasible.
This is a slow project because I don’t have much time to work on it and I need to be sure I’m not making things worse. And I can’t guarantee that I’ll come up with a reasonable, automatic algorithm to restore the names correctly, so it may not work out.
Does this all make sense to the community? Any questions, suggestions, implementation ideas are welcome! Thank you.