Please report surveyor_jr | OpenStreetMap he is indiscriminantly uploading AI generated content (buildings) all accross South Africa.
Hi Rae
Posting things linke this to the forum will only make it take longer.
Write a CS-comment telling the user what you think is problematic. You can also write a DM using the messaging system of OSM.org since the user uses JOSM they will get notified by the software.
If you believe immediate action is absolutely neccessary write an eMail to data@openstreetmap.org clearly stating why you think something needs to be done giving the volunteers at the DWG all info they need (accounts, changesets, descriptions).
Noted, I have reached out to him via direct message, but there has been no reply. You will be able to see that he has uploaded 360 000 changes today and most other days this last month. But I hear you, I guess I am a little upset that the area that I have to spend time on populating requires that I must do a whole lot more work deleting his pseudo buildings. I think I will try additional requests before I escalate.
I feel you.
If you take a look at their profile you will see that @woodpeck invited them to explain their actions here via block message
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Yes I’ve told them that if they intend to upload buildings on that scale they need to go through the proper import process, and I have set out to delete the imported buildings. There’s a lot of them though so this process is ongoing.
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There’s at least one other account, “Surveyor Lewinski”, doing the same kind of imports with the same hashtags “#osmzimbabwe #AfricaMapCup2026 #osmzwawakening #tt_event” - I wonder if these are just copied over from somewhere else since these edits are mostly in South Africa and not in Zimbabwe.
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Hi Fredrick,
Thanks for the update. I did see that Surveyor Lewinski as well as Ruvimbo_29 is doing the same thing, and started commenting on their changesets, where I’ve seen that there are buildings being injudiciously generated from whatever tool they are using.
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@woodpeck I see you’ve reverted at least a few hundred edits, but there are still buildings from Surveyor Lewinsky and possibly Surveyor Jr around me in Pretoria. Were you planning to mass revert these?
If not, then I’m considering reverting some of these myself, since the quality seems quite low, especially compared to the ones I spent hours adding to Rietfontein myself. For example, many polygons don’t cover buildings at all.
Or should I embrace these edits and just remove the “ghost” polygons? I’m fairly new to OSM and don’t know the best course of action here.