Please stay on topic @kaartjesman and let’s all ground ourselves in verifiable facts and not extrapolations from a small dataset.
We will go away and implement the changes as discussed and we remain open to any further suggestions to help us improve our processes.
The fact is that the mappers are shown to lie, they know they should not get it from Google, or from duckduckgo so they lie by omitting the fact that they did from the comments.
The fact is that there is very strong indication that those mappers are NOT mapping according to the principles of OSM: checking on the ground. In fact, that is the main conclusion any mapper will quickly come to if they look at the entire XBT dataset.
Do you dispute those facts?
These are not new worries; you were told about these worries already in an earlier thread, but it only got worse since then. You are still not acknowledging that people HAVE TO CHECK ON THE GROUND before they map.
Here is a good example;
This user edits with a polish locale. Ok, not sure where they live… Ah, here is a changeset ( 128476776) with the comment “update survey date”. So, they were on the ground in… Edinburgh,
Ok, then we see just a couple of days later changeset 128436301. In Milano. Adding lots of new XBT accepting places, all with survey date of that changeset. Ok, our Polish guy gets around…
Here is another one; changeset 128476751, a day before the Milano one. Adding another bitcoin accepting place, also saying they served it in person. But now in a small town in Znojmo, Czechia.
I stopped looking at that point.
Now, I’m not saying the person is lying, its not entirely impossible for someone to travel that much. But its not very likely.
It looks like people are incentivized by your map to create data that supports it. Against the actual quality and guidelines that make openstreetmap a good database, one where people can trust the data to be true and verified.
If I see it right - now they stopped counting deletions in their ranking, or banned people with too many deletions in this ranking 
Jeez. This is becoming quite tedious.
We don’t include any bulk updates in the leaderboard. Just like we didn’t show the bad Galoy additions, we don’t show their reversions either.
If you look at things through a certain lense, you can always see something to reinforce your preconceptions.
Please work with us constructively.
These certain lenses (the laughing emoji is yours by the way)? Needless to say he never replied to that changeset comment.
What’s the meaning of “shame them”?
I was laughing because the comment was funny. Obviously that is not our strategy. We’ve already talked about the need for better verification and so I won’t rehash that.
The shame comment is related to community ownership. As we onboard communities we want them to be proud of their areas in terms of data quality and bitcoin adoption. And yes, shameful if ‘their’ data is poor quality.
@nathan_day there seems to be a difference in culture.
If you look at the OSM wiki, you’ll find quite a lot of (implicit or otherwise) statements towards people mapping only what they can observe with their own two eyes, on the ground. From topics like Verifiability - OpenStreetMap Wiki, and look at the values-table in Key:source - OpenStreetMap Wiki. But also several policy documents linked to earlier in this thread.
Similarly, if you run “Streetcomplete” it is nagging you if you try to tag something where you can’t actually see it based on your physical location.
It follows the old tagline of OSM. “You create a better map of your neighbourhood, I create a better one for mine, we both have a better map”.
What I’m trying to explain here is a culture. A way of doing things which is as old as openstreetmap itself.
And what I see from your group is that there is a very strong disconnect. They do not share the OSM culture. At all. Notice the lack of leaderboards in OSM. There is no competition on numbers here.
Reading this thread I don’t get the impression you take our culture seriously. You stating you realize that people should not get data from Google is nice, but not even half-way to accepting our culture.
I would strongly advice you to consider doing what various other crypto groups are already doing: make your own database that overlays the map, with point of interests that are for you. Then you don’t need to worry about those pesky “OSM Purists” you laugh about on discord.
Examples; (made not-clickable since I moved to this forums only today and I deal with restrictions).
map.usecash dot com
map.bitcoin dot com
There’s zero way people can know if a merchant uses Lighting when they are doing multiple edits in different countries time. Especially if Google is being used as their main source of information. The licensing issues aside, that kind of information just isn’t available on Google Maps. Hell, it’s not even on most merchants websites. So yes, there is “zero way” editors can know if a merchant is using Lighting or not. At as far as this discussion is concerned. It’s pretty obvious the tags are just being added as a boilerplate by default regardless of what the actual merchants use.
Personally, I’d say that’s a huge grey area legally where it would probably be fine to do once in a while, but doing it in a systematic manner to create a map could probably be a legal issue if Google felt like turning it into one. Since your still technically using them as a source to build a map. Although going by the evidence I find the claim that the goal is not to copy data rather dubious. For all intents and purposes that seems to be what your users are doing. You should really make it extremely clear in your policy that people can’t use Google to verify things.
@Mateusz_Konieczny was number five on the leaderboards yesterday and now he isn’t. So something’s clearly been changed about how you tabulate the leaders. Either that, or you banned from the list. He didn’t just disappear from it on his own though.
Jesus Christ, the irony. I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard in awhile 
I don’t really get how it was a small dataset when @Mateusz_Konieczny was number 5 on the leaderboards from deleting what I assume is only a small percentage of the mistakes that your users have added to the map. Considering that and this discussion, the “problems” seem more like a feature of how you do things then they do a bug caused by a few bad mappers or whatever 
Wow, a sensible comment in that cursed thread 
That’s pretty much what I expected to hear about that legal theory of mine. I mean, it’s not baseless, and yea, the more I think about it, the more I agree that it’s not a sustainable loophole. I mean, we obviously can’t recommend it, and I already included copyright notices and verification guidance earlier today. Google was never mentioned in the Wiki guide but it’s better to make things 100% clear and explicit. The same warnings will be added to the website submission form and we’ll post a public message in the editor chat room regarding the copyright issue.
Nathan is working on the OSM Wiki page, so this should be quickly resolved, too. All the issues with the suspected use of anything related to Google as an additional source will be reviewed. We’re just a few unpaid volunteers trying to improve the data set which was in a horrible state (most merchants weren’t updated for ~8 years and many of those merchants are out of business or relocated), so things take time, but we’re acknowledged all constructive feedback and we’ll keep working on improving that data set. It’s our only goal, after all.
A comment on a “blacklist”: yes, it exists, and it used to include well-known OSM bots (b-jazz, etc) and most of our team. It was probably updated to include the people participating with that Galoy import.
Everything except those two issues looks like noise and boring flame war, so I’m not interested in participating. If I missed something important, please let me know and I’ll do my best to resolve any issues.
interesting case, it doesn’t seem to go against anyone’s copyright, does it? Deletions based on Google maps are maybe ok (thinking about streetview here)?
It might be covered under fair use if it’s not being done in a systematic, automated manor. That said, according to their license “All uses of the content must provide attribution to both Google and our data providers.” You could argue even using it to verify the existence of a store would be a “use of the content”, which would require attribution and then lead to the same circular, boring, flame war nonsense that @Igor_Bubelov has mentioned. So at least IMO it’s less about the actual legal technicalities as it is anything related to Google being a taboo.
Although that’s with the caveat that they also say “We require clear, visible attribution when the content is shown” and no content is being shown when something is deleted from OSM. So attribution might not even be “legally” necessary. But probably necessary in the changest comment at least. Again, the hurdle there being OSM, not Google or the law. That’s just my read of it. At the end of the day I don’t think anyone would really care though. At least not outside of the usual group who like to instigate conflict over trivial, non-issues.
The main things here are really the lack of respect for the guidelines and open contempt for OSM users on the side of @nathan_day Et. al. The whole legal aspect of what their doing is a rather weak line of criticism IMO. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it boring flame war stuff, but it’s pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. I can almost guarantee using Google as a source to verify information wouldn’t have even came up or mattered if it wasn’t for the horrendous way they handled it. @Igor_Bubelov updating their contribution guidelines should really be enough though. It’s not really on them what their users do beyond that.
My point is, the whole thread could be replaced with only two messages, where the first message lists the issues and concerns and the second one acknowledges them and lists the steps we’re committing to take in order to resolve them. You can still find this information, but it’s hard because it’s obviously not about those issues, those are used to rationalize the hatred and try to organize a mass harassment campaign towards a small team of new editors, exploiting their lack of experience and framing it as some kind of an evil intent.
It would be fair to admit that most participants, including us, have been mean to other people and it’s not a suitable place for political fights. We’re always happy to get any productive feedback and we benefited tremendously from our multiple encounters with random local OSM editors who commented in our change sets in good faith and taught us about the current best practices and helped us to fix our mistakes by advice or action.
my point was that copyright is about copying, if you delete from your data based on the information learnt from someone else’s data, you are not copying and nothing of their data is in your data
I don’t disagree with that. Which is why I followed it by saying that saying no content is being shown when something is deleted from OSM. Although I think you get into some weird territory if it’s being done in a systematic way. Like as an analogy, would someone be violating copyright if they recreated a painting of a figure using only the negative spaces since technically they are copying the lack of the figure, not the figure itself? Heck if I know
With this, I think the issue would be recreating a facsimile of Google Maps in OSM. At the end of the day it’s still a copy, regardless of if people where just using Google Maps to verify things. Although there’s almost zero chance of anyone doing a 1/1 recreation of Google Maps in OSM that way in the first place. So it’s really a non-issue even if it would technically be illegal once you reached a certain of parity. There’s also the issue of copyright traps in Google Maps, which would likely trip someone up if they were verifying a business just as much as it would if the person was adding one. I still don’t think it’s a super big deal though.
Agreed. What happens to reduce some original data set before it proceeds on its way to update OSM, is not an OSM (nor copyright) issue. Sure, maybe it is too aggressive, but I don’t see a problem with any and all of the following methods of removing data from your dataset in order to clean it up before adding it to OSM:
Note that it only applies to removals from your dataset, not on data already on the OSM (i.e. removing random tags or elements from OSM based on coin-flipping will get you banned!)
Also, it only applies to removals. If you instead such sources as google to add or update information in your dataset which you intend to add to OSM; that is not permissible.
I agree that doing those things to “your dataset” before adding it to OSM is perfectly fine, but no one here that I’m aware of said they had their data set they were editing beforehand before then adding it to OSM. From my understanding the removals are being done directly in OSM based on information obtained directly from Google Maps. There is no intermediary dataset that people doing the editing for BTC Map are interacting with before making the changes in OpenStreetMap. I might have just missed that part of it though.
No idea why, but they updated a few hours ago the discussion @ivanbranco started on GH instead of this thread.
They’ve created the Organized Editing page: Organised Editing/Activities/BTCMap - OpenStreetMap Wiki
I don’t know what exactly you mean by “51 communities” but that’s a lot! How come you recommended “verifying” data on GMaps instead of on the ground? Surely, 51 communities around the world is enough people to verify everything on the ground. (This comment is intentionally snarky, to point out the marketing of greatness that just isn’t there, as @kaartjesman has also already pointed out before)
Also, what I see you guys doing on GH issues just looks dumb. That’s not what they were designed to do, and so that’s not how best to use them. I would suggest you try MapRoulette.
