Those basically fall into the categories of âtechnicalâ and âlegalâ. Taking the technical ones first, there are a bunch of technical restrictions already in place, prompted by the attacks on OSM in 2024 (including slurs against me, for moderation work). Those are, broadly speaking, doing the job that they are supposed to do. The big challenge is that we donât want to make it difficult for a new user to sign up and edit OSM and we donât want to ask for a âgovernment IDâ (some people are editing where there is no or a very authoritarian government).
The DWG** and many other groups do monitor âthings that get vandalisedâ alongside âthings that get broken more regularlyâ (see e.g. here - youâll notice that that has got dealt with fairly quickly each time - minutes rather than hours). Sometimes someone figures out a new âattackâ, perhaps a field that some widely used external data consumer uses but people in OSM tend not to, and sometimes they might take a little longer to spot.
If anyone thinks that something more should be done technically on the âdetectionâ side, then please go for it! There are minutely feeds for data and changesets here, allowing any new tool to be developed without affecting the main site in any way. On the ârestrictionâ side (built into the site) we already get a few false positives (both rate limiting and reports) so I suspect that that is pitched at about the right level, but if something could be improved, contributions of code that would do that are I am sure welcome.
On the âlegalâ side, youâre correct to say that this is often likely impractical. This example in Canada is a bit of an exception; we often get problems from places where there is no functioning government or the government is at war with a neighbouring country or even some of its own people. Even here I suspect that local law enforcement might not prioritise what is basically just name-calling over the other things that they have to deal with.
People in the DWG sometimes do get threats of physical violence or worse. In most cases this isnât actionable - often just a child or other keyboard warrior who is still adapting to real life (accepting that some people simply donât share your beliefs and views), but has no intention to or isnât in any position to carry any threats out. In a couple of more serious cases the authorities have become involved, but its rare. Perhaps one thing that the OSMF board could do is to state how it would support working group and other community members in such a dispute if it became serious.
The challenge in this case (as Minh identified) is that one group of people (some local MTBers) have asked OSM to âPlease stop adding off-map/secret/unsanctioned mtb trails to OSMâ. They want to know about these trails and they want them to be on Strava; they just donât want anyone else to know about them. Itâs actually unclear what the status of these trails are - âhighway=path; surface=groundâ is not very descriptive, but I suspect that they donât have a legal right to be âthe only ones able to access themâ. More actual tags in OSM would help.
What I suspect will work in terms of the data in this example is that eventually the vandal will just get bored and will realise that they will not win.
** Iâm a member of that group
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