[OSM-talk] Postmortem analysys

[Mike N.]

Recently I encountered a CSI-style mystery.  Why was the Skobbler lady (OSM 
Nav based) telling people to go jump off of so many bridges?   An inspection 
showed that the bridges were joined to the interstate highway below, but 
many interchanges otherwise had very high quality edits, with attention to 
many details.  So how did the people who made such skilled edits overlook 
false intersections?  It turns out that they didn't.  A history view shows 
the dreaded "Removing duplicate nodes" in the  change list.   The original 
edit just used JOSM's un(G)lue node command, leaving the dupe nodes in 
place.   A perfectly valid technique until the attack of the duplicate node 
bots.

   Now this is all past history - I think most of the mass and uninformed 
duplicate node work in the US has stopped since last year.  But, like the 
grumpy old man who runs outside and yells at the neighborhood kids who play 
in his yard, you can bet that every time I hear the whir and clickety-clack 
of anything that sounds like an OSM bot, I'll make sure that they've done 
due diligence rather than just relying on only the changeset comment.   But 
quality bot edits are still welcome!

 P.S. Don't get me started on how the dupe node bots made a 3 minute county 
line road fixup into a 30 minute nightmare.