It’s very likely that the data has been cached, either server-side or client-side (the latter can be checked by refreshing your cache i.e. Ctrl+F5). I’m sure it’s the latter because I don’t see the vandalism on my side.
It’s still there even after Ctrl-F5! It is only in the last but one (!) zoom level.
A DB admin could search for most of these by looking for street names with a codepage change to cyrillic for locations outside Russia/Belarus/Ukraine/Serbia etc. Or for Unicode in the range of cyrillic, if Unicode is used.
You mentioned that you don’t see the problem on osm.org, which means the issue is probably fixed in the database. That doesn’t mean it will immediately be fixed in renderers.
I don’t know if this is related, but that site may not be using the recommended tile URL as set out in Tile Usage Policy. I see a lot of references to a.tile.openstreetmap.org (and b. and c.) here, which I don’t think is up to date:
Technicalities aside, note that verkehrslage.de has chosen to use the free tiles provided by OSM which offer no guarantees.
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Thanks for the explanation. Since colleagues of mine tell me they saw similar stuff, I think it could be a good idea to go through the DB and look for cyrillic text on coordinates outside the countries where cyrillic is used (mostly russian/Russia (plus Belarus, Ukraine etc.), but some few other east european languages and their countries as well). In Germany there can be no cyrillic street names, not possible.
Apologies if this reply sounds somewhat frustrated, but it would help if you read through the links that people have provided in answer with your questions. In particular they answer
- that the data in the database is fixed
- that remains of problems may appear in browser cache and in tiles cached by the CDN
- that third-party sites who have chosen to use OSM’s “mapper QA” tiles may see problems for longer than osm.org users will.
More specifically, OSM is a volunteer-run project. If you believe that you will find misplaced text in an area please look for it and if you find it, report it.
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I have read these, thanks. But working as a quality manager in a larger IT operation here I wanted to point out that there is a method for DB admins to find these fakes even if no one reports them. There can be no cyrillic street names in Germany, so ALL cyrillic street names in Germany are fake and can be found by search on DB level with an apropriate SQL SELECT statement. Also, with this method the DB IMHO could be “immunized” against future vandalism.
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Does your “larger IT operation” uses OSM data or sth. like e.g. tiles from OSM(F)?
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I don’t know precisely (not a member of that project), but to my knowledge they use Google (which also has problems with incorrect user input, but so far I know no vandalism issue. In Google it’s mostly that companies add their company and wildly misplace the coordinates 
) And Google just can’t get house numbers correct 
Yes, both true 
But about the problems in OSM: be assured that a lot of developers with a lot of expertise are working on this vandalism problem and on how to get more resilience against vandalism into this open project. Also a lot of developers of some of the biggest names in global IT.
So while we welcome anyone that wants to strengthen the project, you as a quality manager might understand that a thorough expertise and insight into the peculiar IT systems might be needed to improve those and this is not a “one small idea thrown into the ring solves the problem” situation.
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That could be a very useful thing to do : today, one would need a serious investigation to find a timestamp “just before the wave”.
I have no idea why I got an overly sarcastic reply on my original post, and the post then closed so I could not comment on that. I consider this to be really rude.
In ITIL, everyone is encouraged to report problems and supply every bit (!) of information that the reporter has. Including ideas on ways to fix this. Experts will simply ignore redundant information, but not comment on that.
Of course the choice of methods lies in the people implementing the resulting RfC! I absolutely assumed that OSM is run like that and I in no way shape or form want to belittle the efforts or the skills of the team, rest assured. I find the sarcasm written to me offensive.
Which is why I wonder why it is even possible to add cyrillic street labels in countries where cyrrilic letters cannot be used (at all). Street names with cyrillic letters cannot exist in Germany, so every (!) entry with that is by definition fake and could be easily, and automatically, detected.
If you do not want to throttle user input, then refrain from writing offensive comments. Sometimes even “developers with a lot of expertise” don’t listen to ordinary users when they report a problem. I learned this with an OSM related project, OsmAnd, where I reported several years ago (!) that an entire lake (a larger recreational area) in my neighbourhood is missing on one of their maps, which does appear on OSMs web interface (so the DB is correct). They didn’t see the problem, even with screenshots supplied, so after some years I gave up and this map is still incomplete.
While I do not condone the tone of that reply, please have in mind that your report was about 50th about the same issue. The problem was visible in the whole world, and reverberated in several “mirror” (i.e. map rendering) sites down the chain. Everyone in the know is a bit frustrated by now by the combination of repeated vandalism, apparent flaws in our whole ecosystem to detect and prevent propagation of vandal edits, and by a slew of problem reports by well-meaning newcomers who, however, often fail to read the FAQ about the issue…
But you don’t realize that those weren’t “Cyrillic streets in Germany”. Those were “Cyrillic superhighways connecting central Greenland with South Sudan” that only intersected Germany, and there were thousands of similar ones worldwide. As the FAQ explains, those fake entries were detected and reverted from the database “easily” and within an hour. However, the shortcoming of our whole ecosystem is that those data are almost immediately replicated by hundreds of tileservers and other data consumers, which do not have very good algorithms to refresh the rendered maps (itself a complex problem) to get rid of those “ghost” lines.
So we have this thread of 442 posts (and counting) containing a mixture of problem reports, suggested solutions, and explanations why those solutions would not work (in one aspect or another).
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We already have street signs with Arabic and Japanese characters and Cyrillic characters will also be installed at some point. Therefore, such a filter rule makes no sense, especially not in an international project.
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" We already have street signs with Arabic and Japanese characters"
No, we don’t. Look at your own link. I see a standard street signpost that conforms to the law (official texts in Germany have latin characters mandatory, with the only inclusion of umlauts and the ligature of s and z). In your link, you see an additional label, which is just a service like those labels that explain e.g. who a certain celebrity was, whose name that street bears.
“and Cyrillic characters will also be installed at some point. Therefore, such a filter rule makes no sense, especially not in an international project.”
IMHO Wrong. There is one official street name, and this what has to be displayed. There are no non-latin characters in Germany. As a service, OSM could offer transliteration (not to be confused with translation), but this is highly problematic. In the case of cyrillic, there just is no letter “H” in cyrillic. Does not exist, and nothing to take it’s place phonetically. In the official russian transliteration rules, H shall be substitued by the cyrillic letter for G, which of course leads into loads of problems, disambiguities and misunderstandigs… Therefore, the official transliteration of the German city Hannover ist Gannover… (official meaning: According to official russian transliteration rules. By German law, Hannover is only Hannover.
First: Do I have to realize this when looking at a map of traffic jams in Munich?
Second: The fake street in the screenshot I supplied perfectly(!) fits to the existing airport road, which does not have highway status at all. And then it runs straight across the airport’s apron. But it does not intersect.
Third: I’m not familar with Greenland laws, but I bet they don’t use cyrillic letters.
No, but if you have found your way to this topic you could probably have read some of it to find out what was going on.
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My I respectfully suspect that you take a step back and ask yourself how best you can help, rather than continuing to just argue?
Perhaps start by rereading this.
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I did that, and all I got was sarcasm. IMHO OSM could be immunized by not allowing illegal (!) characters upon entry, and sanitized by finding those who already exist. IMHO “oh, we’re international and therefore we allow every input” is not a successful strategy. I do not want to offend anyone with that statement.