I think a post would be appropriate to discuss this issue regarding the number of notes opened by each mapper.
slightly related, in Italy we just finished the project of the month to tackle the open notes issue, in a concentrated effort we were able to close more than 5800 notes in a single month, much more than ever since OpenStreetMap exists. If we continued at this pace we would close them all (as far as possible) within a few months (but this month we are chasing fixmes, and there are even more ).
I canāt speak to Brazil, but I do want to mention one use-case that I participate in around my area: one person opening a note, with the explicit intention of having someone else confirm it, add/update the map, and close it.
That actually seems more expected to me, as opposed to the same person opening the note and later closing it. They are public for a reason.
I will create a new post on the subject, because the large number of notes created by a single mapper causes the notes to be forgotten in OSM and their information to become ineffective, diminishing their importance over time, as the information may no longer be up to date.
Have you tried suggesting to them (perhaps via the Brazilian forum) that adding more notes than local mappers in an area can ever cope with doesnāt in any way help?
I did not contact them directly, but we created a discussion about the notes on the Brazilian forum and we are updating them on the progress of the closed notes.
At the next meeting of Brazilian mappers, we will talk about the results of the closed notes in May. However, it is an effort that requires the help and understanding of those who create their own notes, since the mapper should at least take care not only to create many notes but also to close them. If you create many notes in an area where there are no local people to close them, this note will remain in OSM for years without another mapper entering the information.
With anonymous notes coming from an application, I donāt know if it would be possible to determine the number of open notes when they are closed, but coming from a mapper logged into the PC, I believe it would be useful to only create new notes with a certain number of closed notes or equivalent.
I think that history in Brazil shows that more notes are opened than closed and not mapped in OSM. So just creating notes does not solve the problem of having an updated map, on the contrary, it disregards the information that remains there in OSM without being added to the map.
Do you think itās normal to have an 8-year-old note in OSM? And what about those who only create notes and donāt close them? Do you think thatās normal? Just create notes.
The purpose of notes is to save information to be mapped in OSM. But as I said, information in OSM that hasnāt been mapped for a long time loses its importance.
Information thatās a few days old is no longer up-to-date information.
Separate notes of questionable quality, which are often anonymous notes, from cartographers who report problems in the data (except notes like: there are no houses drawn here)
Whats with them? Perfectly fine. Some want just help with creating notes (and yes, thats help as well), some just want to add trees, some want just to add street lights and some want to add everything.
Yes. If iām somewhere on vacation or i see something when checking on something someone have written in the forum, i open a note. And i will probably never visit there.
Not in my opinion, but to be honest, its not completely clear whats ultimately the goal. But, in my opinion its to give hint about a problem on the map. Either its something missing, or something needs to be changed, ā¦ whatever.
So yes, if someone decides to just open notes, well, yes, its a bit weird(to me!), i would try to encourage them to map something themself but i donāt have a problem with the fact itself.
But, we stray, this thread is about anonymous notes and i think they are good and needed for osm.
That seems to set an impossibly high bar. If we canāt act on information more than a few days old, that rules out mapping anything from aerial imagery, among other things. Clearly mappers would need to apply common sense when acting on old notes, but that applies in many other contexts.
Overall I find it a little hard to follow whether you are complaining about anonymous notes, or identifiable OSM mappers who add a lot of notes, or two separate issues.
Notes are not just personal aides memoires. They are also intended for āIād like to report something missing here, but I donāt know enough about OSM to add itā. (Or āI donāt have the timeā, or āIām not in front of an editing device right nowā, or simply āI canāt be botheredā.) That applies even if someone adds one note or 100.
Opening notes without personally closing them was absolutely within the spirit of the original design.
Why? The notes system is what it is, and people use it how they want to use it.
Treating it as some sort of ādetailed metricā is a mistake. If you donāt want to see notes on osm.org you can literally just turn them all off. If you want to search for some and ignore the rest, you can.
With a DWG hat on Iāve seen arguments between people using notes as a ātask managerā for other people and people seeing them as a todo list for they themselves to complete. Both of those are somewhat within the spirit of the idea of notes, but at different ends of it. My best suggestion would be ādonāt stress over notes - they are only notes, not map dataā.
This is your opinion to interpret it as something normal that notes have been in OSM for years and there is no modern mechanism to better manage these notes through the website itself with an update regarding the creation of notes.
Many things are advancing in OSM, such as design, new tools, why not advance in the issue of creating notes?
We need to hear the opinion of other mappers as well to see what they think about a new system for creating notes or fixing/improving what is already in OSM.
Depending on note type. The more people create notes the more my expectation of well formed, fixable and clear and useful notes go up.
Someone creates single unclear note? Fine, I will inquire what they meant
Someone creates 100 unclear notes? I will close all of them, without edits.
Someone creates 10 notes that require a lot of effort to fix and are fairly unimportant? (āhere landuse=grass is missing, it should be mappedā) Fine
1000? I will close them without any other action.
I can imagine someone creating many useful and important notes and not editing, though I never encountered it.
that is extreme exaggeration, notes that few days old are not less valuable than notes that are few minutes old (anonymous anoes need to be verified anyway and so on)
).