I believe that the vandal was blocked and the changes reverted.
1 Like
True, but it doesn’t negate the fact that their edits in Ukraine were reverted by non-Ukrainians and no one from the community ever said or did anything about it. At least not from what I can tell.
1 Like
without anyone from Ukrainian?
1 Like
“From Ukraine”, obviously. Chalk it up to writing the message on my phone. I wouldn’t worry to much about the exact wording of specific messages in the conversation, no matter who they are written by. Otherwise, your just going to miss the forest for the trees. Anyway, I don’t think dfn5h54563 and the user I was talking about the same person. So I’m not really sure what your point in bringing them up is, but cool that a few people spoke out about a user I wasn’t talking about in another conversation while refusing to take a position on it in this one.
As I’ve said, I don’t really care if someone in another discussion mentions something that has nothing to do with this discussion. If they are actually against the behavior there’s no reason they can’t or couldn’t have just said so in here when people outside of Ukraine were (and still are) asking them about it. Maybe it’s just me, but that seems like an easy win. To the point that I don’t really get why it’s taken almost a year for them to just condone it despite multiple asking them to. Hell, I’ve asked multiple Ukrainian users to condone the behavior just today and none of them have. I just got attacked for asking them to. So you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t really find the conversations you linked to as evidence of anything 
Follow your own link - it’s the same user you were talking about.
Coincidentally a bull’s eye, this was just one of 7000 sockpuppets, dozens of whom have engaged in massive vandalism, destroying data in countless mass edits around the world. It wasn’t just the DWG that was busy with this for days. But you don’t seem to have noticed.
2 Likes
where’s the 
button?
(Also this post “was flagged as inappropriate: the community feels it is offensive, abusive, to be hateful conduct or a violation of our community guidelines”. It would be nice if the hatefully offended and abused community would come out of the hiding place where they can flag posts they dislike and tell us what precisely is inappropriate in wishing to thumbs-down a post.)
1 Like
I thought your message was in response to the last comment I wrote where I was referring to uwr_PretObulation1538. Not something I linked to like 7 comments above that. That said, It’s possible they are all socks of each other
I’ve actually spent a bunch of time looking through the histories of the people involved in these edits and I never saw any involvement from people in the Ukrainian community anywhere. It’s possible I just missed it, but if so, it’s clearly not proportional and removing Russian names from the map doesn’t receive the same response as pro-Russian edits do. Cool if someone from Ukraine dealt with a couple of users and edits over the last 2 years that it’s been an issue though. It clearly doesn’t balance out and the edits/editors are treated differently regardless.
@Adamant1 Unfortunately, you continue to ignore any attempts to bring you to the senses. You just repeat over and over again your narrative.
Let me sum it up for you once again:
- Ukrainian community is against mass-removal of name:ru tags. It is clearly a vandalism
- Since the active phase of the war started, there were several users who mass-removed things. DWG found over 7000 accounts linked just to one person. There were others, though not at this scale.
- The Ukrainian community had a hard hit in the sense that number of mappers has significantly dropped. At some periods, there was close to no human presence on OSM.
- All recent attempts to mass-remove things are reported to DWG once we learn about them
- Old edits are difficult to revert
- Automated edits must be discussed in the community, but that is not always followed by individuals
With this said, of course, you could easily find individual changesets or even whole user accounts without discussions. Sometimes we even did not bother to start those and wrote straight to the DWG (only recently).
Now, in regards to the general contents of some of the name:ru tags. As for the toponyms, especially below the city level, they often do not exist on the ground. They were automatic transliterations, often incorrect. Currently, there exists no official database of Russian toponyms on the territory of Ukraine. Hence, if somebody mass-adding those tags, it will indicate automatic translation or transcription. The only source of Russian toponym names by these days is in the knowledge of people or from the USSR era maps. This does not justify the undiscussed mass removal of the existing tags, of course.
For non-toponyms, the truth-on-the-ground must be followed for the “name” tag. In the past, some users were mass-transliterating names. Frankly speaking, I am guilty of this too, because I was transliterating Ukrainian names into name:en back in 2011-2014 with _sevbot account.
When such mass edits come from Russia, it is naturally frowned upon. For example, hundreds of Russian mappers invaded Crimea in the OSM back in 2014, and they destroyed Ukrainian there. They called it “Russian Spring”. Later many of these vandalistic mass-removals were reverted by Russian mappers themselves because vandalism is always vandalism.
There is a general consensus among the Ukrainian OSM community that once the war is over, there will be tons of work on repairing things in OSM. Hence, we are not eager to revert two years old things en masse. Of course, we will prevent such attempts when noticed. Please note that Russia and its OSM community were not negatively affected, e.g. they have resources to see and act upon vandalism even on the Ukrainian map, which is a good thing in my opinion.
Regarding that “decolonisation” that you found on one of the accounts: that title comes from the name of a telegram channel. What it is, in reality, is a published official list of street/village renames which are backed by the relevant governmental decrees. And those are hand-made. It is, obviously, a controversial or even a bad name, but the edits themselves are legit. The links to Telegram provide traceability.
And finally, iWowik is a notoriously known radical person with programming skills. So, sad combination for us. Search for his nickname on the forums, you will find that he brought a lot of problems through the years.
I hope I covered most of your arguments and did not miss anything important. However, your arguments felt more than attacks, e.g. passive aggressive a lot. I wish we would have a more constructive tone of discussion.
17 Likes
I’ve been pretty clear from the beginning that I’d just like to see the Ukrainian community clarify the article and take a stance against people removing Russian names from Ukraine. I wouldn’t call the degree to which I’ve pointed out their unwellness to that a “narrative.” I don’t really have any story I’m trying to tell here outside of making it clear that the community has failed to do either one of those things in the year (more or less) that people have been asking them to.
Like I said already, I’m not the one who keeps bringing up the war, I could really care less about the politics. And to the degree that I’ve repeated myself it’s been directly proportional to the unwellness on your side to address why this conversation was started. The is that I wouldn’t be involved in this right now if the community had of just dealt with it appropriately from the beginning. Your the ones repeating a narrative by acting like there’s to this on my end then that.
Good. I’m glad your willing to say it’s vandalism almost a year later and after multiple people asked the community to take stance on it multiple times. Easy clap…
Like I said, I’ve looked into this a lot over the last year or two. I’m not just cherry picking individual changesets to fit a narrative or whatever. There’s plenty of examples where the Ukrainian community all but ignored anti-Russian edits while promptly dealing with pro-Russian ones in the meantime.
That’s all well and good, but people who explicitly state “civilized world dont needs language of russian rapists of children and womens” clearly aren’t making the edits because the names are miss-translations. So I don’t really see how your tangent about toponyms or whatever is relevant
First of all the edits removing Russian names aren’t two years old. Secondly, the claim that the community prevents such attempts when it notices them is clearly false. Multiple people in this conversation have pointed out changesets were Russian names were removed from the map and their comments were all but ignored. Hell, your the only one who’s even acknowledged it’s going on or said it’s a problem. So your the idea that the community prevents such attempts when they see them is totally ridiculous on its face. Maybe there’s instances where they have prevented the edits from happening or whatever, but it’s clearly not consistent and they are more willing to acknowledge and/or deal with pro-Russian edits then anti-Russian ones.
Okay, you’re clearly not listening. And you are full of sarcasm and trolling. Now you fell so low that you started even cursing. You specifically ignored any arguments and repeat, “Nothing has been done in a year or is being done”. You accused me of falsehood.
Fine. I see no need to spend more time on this discussion. You are absolutely sure that the Ukrainian community is a failure and liars and nothing can change that. Great, let it be so.
Bye.
1 Like
Could this be documented on the Wiki page “Russian-Ukrainian War”?
2 Likes
OK, _sev. I don’t see how I’m not listening, trolling, or being sarcastic when I directly quoted you and cited actual examples to back up what I said. But sure, quoting your own words and changeset comments is “sarcasm and trolling.” Whatever you say.
I don’t think I said anything in my comment that was cursing. I know I didn’t mean to swear. So maybe I just miss spelled something. It is 2am Afterall. If your willing to point out what exactly I said that you think is cursing I’d be more then happy to fix it. Although you throwing around accusations and nitpicking over wording in the meantime isn’t that great of a way to treat someone either
Maybe it’s just me, but it’s rather low to on the one hand claim someone else is trolling, not listening, and being sarcastic while putting words in the person’s mouth in the next message. I never said the Ukrainian community was a failure or lying and I don’t really appreciate you acting like I did. It’s pretty clear your resorting to ad hominem comments because you can’t just address my message on the actual merits of what I said though.
Unfortunately, the majority of posts in this thread are from non-Ukrainians, and the tone of the discussion, thanks to some participants, is negative. From my subjective point of view, we are mostly being lectured and judged in this thread.
I am in favor of such wording, with only minor changes. But I think we shouldn’t rush to add it to the wiki without a broader discussion among Ukrainian participants who don’t speak English. I am writing here myself through an automatic translator.
None of the Ukrainian participants in this thread could have prevented the activities of automated bots even if they wanted to, without the intervention of DWG. The more participants with different competencies would participate in the “war of edits”, the more chaos would be in the data. I have no experience in rolling back changes affecting thousands and thousands of objects. And while someone’s automatic bot is working, it makes no sense at all. Only after the bot is blocked does it make sense to roll back its changes.
9 Likes
I think we all regret that this is happening.
That is understandable. Is it possible for Ukrainians mappers to discuss this topic among themselves and to share an updated mapping guideline for Ukraine with the international OSM community?
1 Like
Realistically the street name situation is much more nuanced than “we must remove all name:ru!” or “we must prevent the removal of any name:ru!”. There are changes to names mandated by local authorities and discussed in detail in other threads and forums. A number of the name:ru were added as “translations” and apparently were never verifiable. I’m sure there are also verifiable name:ru too.
I can fully understand why the local community chose not to interact in detail with the stream of 30-odd sockpuppets that removed name:ru locally and globally. Once the pattern had been established it was clear that these sockpuppets were not being operated in good faith. My initial block messages were simply “vandal account” (since edited) because there wasn’t time to write more before moving on to the next one.
Not true; see my comment above.
Also false. Just because the people reporting and dealing with the problem didn’t update you personally with every stage of the process didn’t mean that these changesets were “ignored”.
You clearly believe that you are right. A number of people here are saying that you are not. This can only mean that one of the following is true:
- You are correct and everyone else is wrong
- You are wrong but believe you are right because you aren’t able to process the information that is being presented to you.
- You know you’re wrong but just like to argue with people.
8 Likes
Just to be clear, I don’t really have an issue with the street name thing, how it was handled, and I don’t think I’ve said anything about it either. Most of the edits I saw where the Russian language was removed had to do with buildings and POIs. I think _sev was the one who brought roads into the conservation though.
I don’t expect anyone, Ukrainian or otherwise, to interact in detail with 30-odd sockpuppets. I know I never said anyone should deal with them. Obviously that’s on the DWG to resolve. As far as I know the changesets and users that were brought up a few months ago weren’t sockpuppets though. Individual users removing Russian names from the map because “civilized world dont needs language of russian rapists of children and womens” or whatever is clearly within the Ukrainian communities peer view. Otherwise they should update the Wiki article to make it clear they aren’t the ones dealing with the issue
And see my comment above where I provided evidence that they don’t. We can go back and forth cherry picking examples all day. Like I’ve said though, I’m sure they deal with anti-Russian edits. It’s just not to the same degree that they deal with pro-Russian ones. I assume you get the difference.
I never said the changesets were ignored because I wasn’t personally consulted about them. They were ignored because no one had commented on or reverted them months later. Again, I’m sure you get the difference. Nowhere have I said anyone should have consulted me about anything or that the changesets were ignored because I wasn’t involved in dealing with them.
This isn’t really about right or wrong. It can both true that the Ukrainian community deals with anti-Russian edits but that they don’t do it to an adequate enough degree and have ignored peoples concerns about it in the process. The same goes for them not clarifying the Wiki article. It’s just a fact that the article hasn’t been updated to clarify things. That fact has nothing to do with me being “right” or “wrong” about anything. It just is. As a side to that the repeated gaslighting and false accusations every time you respond to me in every discussion is getting rather tiring. So I’d appreciate it if you found someone else to badger. I have better things to with my time then spend it repeatedly countering your dishonest comments.
1 Like
For the avoidance of doubt, that changeset comment was never used by “individual users”. It corresponds exactly with one series of sockpuppets. I know, because I was the one blocking them as they started editing.
1 Like
Maybe “that” changeset wasn’t done by individual users but multiple changesets and users have been brought up in this conversation and some of them were. Their changeset comments weren’t that different from the one I quoted either.
Please stop arguing with this troll who keeps sowing discord to bait other users into sending frustrated replies. It’s counterproductive to the discussion.
4 Likes
You mean kind of like accusing other users of being trolls? Real productive and not baitish of you 