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.
10 Likes
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.
So: thank you for your suggestion how to validate map input. However, this validation can be trivially bypassed by vandals creating ultra-long lines named in Latin characters, which actually happened about a month ago. Or by creating ultra-long lines without a name at all.
And if you’re going to suggest next that we introduce validations preventing creation of ultra-long lines, we have also discussed that, and found that it’s hard to detect without blocking legitimate changes.
11 Likes
I accept that you did not intend to offend anybody, but sometimes it can still come across as slightly offending when a new contributor pops up with a simple solution and thereby insinuates that everyone else must be somehow dumber than him (“why didn’t you think of this simple solution before”). Now that we have explained to you that your simple solution won’t work, I hope the matter is settled. There’s no shame in proposing a simple solution that doesn’t work; it would however not be wise to insist on that non-working solution.
29 Likes
Add the ability to limit changeset size by tomhughes · Pull Request #4908 · openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website · GitHub got merged! It is one of steps toward new user being blocked from globe spanning edit.
Now we will get questions “why I cannot add name of USA in my language? Edits gets rejected as it has too large bounding box, whatever it is”. But sadly we will need to accept this tradeoff given increase in vandal activity within recent months.
Note: it will limit this specific type of vandalism. It will not eliminate fully possibility to vandalise OSM and new tools/protection methods etc are welcome. Especially in form of working code where design was discussed with relevant parties.
Thanks to everyone who worked on countering various vandals, in various ways.
EDIT: as pointed out in Maybe rate limit changeset size? · Issue #4805 · openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website · GitHub this is initial step, not full deployment
24 Likes
" The “OSM Standard tile layer” looks wrong…", in that no matter what, in whatever zoom, no matter the browser used, caches/cookies cleared, my edits of at least the last 18 hours do not show up in Carto S. A simple typo correction of Vwnti to Venti over 18 hours ago in max zoom 19 (is where the square name only shows up).
Either the tile renderer is on longer raincheck, I missed the big announcement of suspension of the render engine service for longer which makes it look like the sabotage has succeeded,
(Yes, the data in ID edit mode does look it is in).
It looks fine here, and has your edit from six hours ago:
I never stated that my method cannot be bypassed. But it would prevent many vandalisms. Not all. But many. It will never be possible to prevent all of them, but IMHO that should not lead to not preventing those who could be prevented. Don’t you think?
Really? Is that a supported feature? That I rename the US of A? Why ?? Labels in other languages should IMHO only be done by the OSM team with quality checked translations, otherwise you risk that someone uses foul words or propaganda, just in a langage only few people will understand…
I’m very sure that since the recent vandalism spree started, the standard tile layer is updated much slower than a couple days ago.
First, I never wrote (or meant) you are dumber than me. I am always polite and try to be helpful.
Second, so far I did not see an explanation why my suggestion wouldn’t work. When it comes to labelling objects, there is one and only one official wording. IMHO that is the only one that should be supported. If you start with individual (!) labels, then please bear in mind that sometimes labels are language dependend, some languages miss certain letters (like russian), sometimes labels are politically motivated (think of China or Myanmar) etc. pp.
Even some harmless names like Germany’s Frankfurt is Fráncfort in Spanish… Regensburg in Bavaria is Ratisbona! I guess you will never have the manpower to keep track of all of these ambigueties. Or think of Beijing, which only recently gets called like this in German, before it was always Peking.
And when we are in China - there is more than one “Chinese”. Which one do you want to support? Simplified Chinese, Chinese Traditional, Mandarin, etc…
Japanese know three different sets of glyphs.
China, Japan and Russia have official English translations of names. So a default English seems plausible, with the addition of local language (but, again, only the official wordings should count). Possibly with a user option switch for “English” or “Local language” or, “English and local”.
Yup, that’s the monument I mapped this morning at centre of that square. Switched to personal hotspot on mobile, getting the same stale data served in Carto. Went to the mobile browser never used, same same, so wonder which tile server group is not refreshing that feeds Italy.
I intentionally mentioned “added” not “rename”. It is welcome to add names (as long as these are accurate and real names and not copied from source of incompatible or unclear license) in various rare languages.
Renames are also fine, as long as they improve data.
1 Like
I have also noticed this. I’ve added a number of buildings over the past 36 hours and haven’t seen any show up in the standard layer tiles.
Maybe an issue on some render servers but not others, or different CDN nodes? I just used a VPN to pretend I’m in the UK and did a hard refresh of osm.org. This brought in fresh tiles showing my recent edits. After disconnecting the VPN another hard refresh brought back the stale tiles without my recent edits. I’m in the northeastern US.
1 Like
How do you safeguard the first paragraph? Which is an absolute must… And how do you check the second?
Yes there are eight render servers (two for the US) and innumerable CDN caches in front of that so everybody will have a different experience.
Everything is operating normally and all render servers are up to date but as we have been deliberately forcing them to treat old tiles as expired to clear any vandalism they are busier than normal and when busy will prioritise rendering missing tiles over re-rendering of dirty ones.
5 Likes
Btw., I could think of another method of blocking (or finding) such entries. Rather than by size: Such a superhighway would go over (or under?) large water bodies… (North Sea etc.) and across country borders. I know no road that would span countries. Even the famous Panamericana doesn’t. That is just a name (although very popular), but actually consists of several roads that connect to each other at the borders (or not, because Panamericana is not without gaps…) and within countries, the official name could be completely different to the name in the next bordering country.
The “OSM team” is all of us, the contributors, so I’m not sure what you are suggesting here?
23 Likes
Whenever a project, like OSM, that has existed for some time, has some blatantly obvious problems with blatantly obvious solutions that still have not been implemented, there are nearly always some not-no-obvious reasons why those solutions have not been implemented. Those reasons may be technical, legal, practical, cultural or a number of other things. In OSM, it is often a combination of culture and lack of central manpower. You say some things should only be done by the “OSM team”. There is no OSM Team. Or you could say that there is one and every person on the planet (and any E.T, should they care to show up) is on it.
For any mode of vandalism you can think of, there is probably some fairly simple rule that would stop that particular mode of vandalism. With a bit of luck, the rule won’t hamper legitimate mapping. However, there are infinitely many ways of vandalizing the map. To successfully protect the map, you need to think of them all. The vandal just needs to think of one.
One solution is to put central regulations on things. Make it so that only administrators can add names in new languages to countries, or move nodes across continents. The obvious problems with that solution are manpower and organization Who are these administrators supposed to be? There is also a technical problem: exactly what edits should be limited (see previous paragraph!). The not-so-obvious problem is culture. OSM has an idealistic background, and lot of OSM:ers are idealists. The “O” in OSM is important. It’s supposed to be the open map, that anyone can improve. Maybe these ideals are untenable in the modern world, but a lot of OSM:ers still prefer to believe that they can be upheld. In any case, a culture change is not to be taken lightly, and is not going to happen quickly. (Just to be explicit: I am, at the moment, arguing neither for nor against such a culture change!)
20 Likes