Vandalizem ali masovno brisanje zaradi povrsnosti

Lepo pozdravljeni,

Na tem forumu sem povsem nov, vendar pa nisem nov na OSM, kjer delam vnose ze kakih 10 let pod tem uporabnikom, pred tem pa tudi pod drugim uporabnikom.

Pred nekaj meseci sem opazil, da so mi izginili kompletno vsi vnosi, ki sem jih delal na Veliki Planini in okolici vse od leta 2016 pa nekje do leta 2020. Moram reci, da sem bil res zelo jezen, saj sem vse poti prehodil po veckrat in sproti popravljal, kar sem ugotovil, da sem narobe vnesel. V to je slo res ogromno casa, sploh ce racunate, da sem bil na Veliki Planini do sedaj ze preko 300 krat – po razlicnih poteh. Ves ta cas bi lahko tudi kako drugace porabil.

Zato sem takrat zacel spremljati spremembe na lokacijah, kjer sem dejaven, tako da bi lahko opazil, kdaj bo naslednjic prislo do tako masovnega brisanja.

No in vceraj, 8. julija je prisel ta dan, saj sem opazil, da je v prejsnjem tednu prislo do velikih sprememb na podrocju od Komende, preko Senturske gore do okolice Cerkelj.

Ko sem natancneje pogledal sem takoj opazil, da manjkata dve hisi, ki sem ju jaz vnesel, dodana pa je bila ena, kjer hise v realnosti sploh ni. Potem sem se lotil resevanja tega problema in sem opazil, da to ni edina zadeva, ki je bila izbrisana. Prislo je do masovnega brisanja. Manjkale so prakticno vse hise po vec naseljih. Primer. Cerkljanska dobrava in Klanec pri Komendi. Vsa ta brisanja pa je naredil Josko Horvat iz Velike Polane 193. Torej iz povsem drugega konca Slovenije.

Seveda sem naredil revert vseh teh brisanj, saj je bilo tega res ogromno in je nemogoce v kratkem casu vse preveriti in popraviti.

Josko Horvat sicer zagovarja svojo verzijo, ki pravi: “…Z revertom, ki si ga naredil, si pobrisal vse hišne številke, ponovno so se pojavili enormni offseti hiš. POI oznake, ki sem jih vnesel so izginile, skratka vrnil si kraj za cca 10 let v preteklost. Zdaj pa sledeče: Če hočeva biti racionalna. Če ne jaz, bo nekdo drug prišel z enako željo, da popravi napake, ki mrgolijo.”

To pa seveda ni res, saj bom na spodnjem primeru pokazal, da so ze pred tem bile na hisah tako hisne stevilke in podatki o naslovu, kot tudi hise so bile pravilno pozicionirane. Seveda pa vem tudi za primere, ko hise dejansko niso bile pravilno pozicionirane.

No pa samo poglejmo primer hise Tadeja Pogacarja, ki je na stevilki Klanec 59.

V1. Hisa dodana dne: 24. Julija 2011 by BlueSpark2001
Hisa ob dodajanju ni imela tagov

V2. Josko Horvat doda tage v zvezi z naslovom dne 30. Januarja 2022

V3. Josko Horvat pobrise komplet hiso, skupaj z vsemi drugimi Hisami v naselju dne: 6. Julija 2024
Zakaj je bilo to treba? Naj omenim, da je ze BlueSpark2001 v prvi verziji povsem pravilno pozicioniral hiso in da ni bila popolnoma nic narobe postavljena.

V4. ChrisM4 opazi, da je Josko Horvat naredil masovno brisanje (vandalizem? povrsnost?) in naredi revert dne: 8. Julija 2024 Changeset: 153694385 | OpenStreetMap

Kaj lahko iz tega primera vidimo?

  1. Ne drzi, kar trdi Josko, da sem pobrisal vse hišne številke, saj sem vrnil situacija na stanje iz leta 2022, ko so le te dejansko tam bile.
  2. Ne drzi, da so se ponovno so se pojavili enormni offseti hiš, saj sem jaz le “obudil” nazaj vse hise, ki jih je Josko Horvat pred dnevi pobrisal.
  3. Ne drzi, da so izginile POI oznake, ki jih je Josko Horvat vnesel, saj sem situacija le vrnil na stanje, ki ga je pustil Josko Horvat leta 2022. Menim, da je bolje, da hise so, kot pa da jih ni.
  4. Ne drzi, da sem vrnil situacijo za cca 10 let v preteklost, ker pred 10 leti so vsaj hise bile, po Joskovih brisanjih pa jih ni bilo vec. Prav tako se tudi na primeru hise Tadeja Pogacarja vidi, da je bila situacija vrnjena na leto 2022, ko je vnesel spremembe ravno Josko Horvat. Ni mi pa jasno, zakaj je bilo potrebno letos vse skupaj pobrisati.

To objavo sem naredil zgolj zaradi tega, ker je Josko Horvat na Telegramu objavil najino korespondenco in dvomim, da je situacijo pravilno prikazal.

Lep dan se naprej in cim manj masovnega brisanja in vandalizma zelim.

1 Like

That sucks. Was some automation involved, old base data or how did it even get to this? It’s clearly a heated issue, but have you two managed to get to the bottom of it, find the root cause?

And what about Velika Planina, same issue?

@Jaka_Kranjc

According to my current information, we have several different types of data loss.

  1. Deletion by users, as I described in the case of Josko Horvat. In this case, the deletion can be seen in the history (audit trail) and a revert can be made.

  2. Disappearance of data where nothing can be determined. This is in the case of Velika Planina.

Ident 1
It was explained to me / I saw information that Josko Horvat is preparing some corrections based on GURS data. In doing so, he uses an automation prepared by David Karlaš. And this automation can only merge existing objects with the new ones, when they match within 70% (in theory), otherwise only these must be merged manually. The “merging” process obviously cannot make a correct decision in the case when several buildings are next to each other and are either offset or drawn incorrectly. Considering that there are really a lot of these objects, it is much easier if Josko Horvat deletes all previous entries and then generates them anew. However, in his words, this results in “collateral damage”, where more is wiped than should be. And this was also the first matter that I noticed and described in the first post.

What bothers me about this is that there is something going on behind the scenes in this community, where a group of power users do something their own way and wipe out all the work of other users who have spent a lot of hours on their work. However, I agree that some users really make very bad entries and even with my entries there would be some entry that I am not proud of, but at the time of the entry I really did not have good information available to make my work look as excellent as possible.

There are also other cases when these power users simply delete an otherwise very precise entry, and then make the same entry in the same place, which may even be of poorer quality. An example of my entry from October 2, 2015, when I drew a route between Kamniski vrh and Hud Konc and it was erased and replaced with a bad entry on May 11, 2020. And then I just take a hard look at where my entries have disappeared.

Ident 2
These are cases where objects disappear without a trace. For me, not only Velika Planina disappeared, but also the vast majority of entries from other areas that I entered until approximately 2020.
Here, however, it looks as if there were two types of deletions, because there is no record of deleted objects in the audit trail at all. They just blew out.

Method 1. There was an error in the database where OSM is stored and they restored an older backup. However, I strongly doubt that this happened, because there would be a whole revolt between OSM users, because in my case the entries disappeared somewhere from 2016 and 2020. So other users would also notice that their entries disappeared for such a long period and would complained en masse.

Method 2. Someone with special rights and access to the database simply deleted the entries of certain users for a certain period directly in the database. On the one hand, this option is very likely, but on the other, the question immediately arises, why would this person do this and what would he gain from it?

So this is just my thinking on the subject and not accusing certain people. However, this is happening, and at the moment it really seems pointless to me to persist with further work in this area.

That is simply not a thing in OSM.

Can you identify an object that you added that there is “no record of” in OSM - specifically what date you added it and which account you added it from?

More generally are there any Data Working Group ticket numbers for any of these issues?

Hi @SomeoneElse thank you for your quick response.

While I was trying to prepare the data for you, I noticed that it wasn’t just my entries that disappeared, but so are “My GPS Traces” under Public GPS Traces from ChrisM4 | OpenStreetMap from this period.

For explorational purposes I think it would be best to focus on the two paths below. These two were already entered before me and I was just correcting them. I corrected the second of the two paths at least 10 times, but this is not visible at all in the audit trail.

According to my working workflow from that period, I first walked the route, and the next day I uploaded the GPX to OSM and made corrections immediately after I uploaded them. Since I still have all GPX saved on my Garmin, my change dates could be (not all but most of these, especially those from July):

October 1, 2020
September 25, 2020
September 19, 2020
September 10, 2020
August 1, 2020
July 22, 2020
July 16, 2020
July 9, 2020
July 2, 2020
June 1, 2020
May 22, 2020
May 18, 2020
May 15, 2020
May 11, 2020

For those that I entered anew, I can find the dates when it happened, but I can’t find the route ID because I didn’t write them down.

I made all these changes under the account ChrisM4 (ChrisM4 | OpenStreetMap)

Hard to see traces being removed by others… you own them and declare them public if you wish so. Right now your account shows 103 traces but only 5 are public and no option for me to do anything to those traces but to use for viewing or mapping.

I don’t believe that you edited there with that account on those dates. A regular OSM “way history” won’t show node edits but the integrated history in Potlatch does; and that doesn’t show any changes to nodes in https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/749724263. An overpass query of around that date does not show edits there by you around then. Searching a database of OSM changesets does not show edits by your username in that period:

 user_name |    id     |     created_at
-----------+-----------+---------------------
 ChrisM4   |  42250466 | 2016-09-18 16:09:29
 ChrisM4   |  42448938 | 2016-09-26 15:50:25
 ChrisM4   |  42449521 | 2016-09-26 16:13:38
 ChrisM4   | 103337312 | 2021-04-21 11:41:13
 ChrisM4   | 116307381 | 2022-01-18 16:50:16
 ChrisM4   | 116307528 | 2022-01-18 16:54:04

That user name is associated with only one unique userid (640327).

Well yes. That’s what I’m talking about. This is strange of course but these edits that I mentioned definitely disappeared somehow. It looks like a partial restore of a database or something. It definitely isn’t something that a regular user would delete in JOSM or Potlach or similar.

And since I’m a software developer and I work on databases and information systems I know that such things I am talking about are possible but very hard to detect for sure. To find it one should check the missing row IDs in the database. But that would take lots of work I know.

Er - no. I’m a site moderator, so (a) I know what happens when information is redacted and (b) if information had been redacted I’d see evidence of that. There haven’t been any “database restores” or similar across that time period.

For the most part, I’ve come to accept that we won’t find out. So don’t worry about putting too much effort into it. I mentioned this disappearance in connection with another deletion I discovered.

Perhaps I’m not the only one experiencing this. It took me a while to notice because I hadn’t been checking regularly, and I certainly didn’t expect things to just vanish.

Whilst I can’t prove a negative, I suspect that it is extremely unlikely that data could have been “lost” from the OSM database without people complaining about it, and the DWG (which I’m a member of) is where people would normally complain to.

Maybe you recorded the GPS traces but didn’t update that data in OSM the following day?