@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.
button?