[HOT] Analysis of when mappers joined OSM

[Paul Norman]

On 8/24/2017 7:30 AM, Bryan Housel wrote:
> Hi Janet,
> The OSM API can give details about when a user created their account, 
> and how many changesets they have contributed.
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6#Details_of_a_user
>
> While the API will tell you how many changesets a user is up to right 
> now, it’s not easy to know how new the user was at the time they made 
> an edit.  For this reason, the next version of iD will also include 
> the user's `changesets_count` as a tag on each changeset, to make this 
> analysis a bit easier.

You should not be using the OSM API for this type of analysis. Instead, 
the best way to do it is with the changeset dump files. This includes 
all the changeset data, so you can tell when a user's first changeset 
was, how many changesets they had at any particular time, and all the 
details on a changeset.

Generally I load the changeset data into a PostgreSQL database with 
ChangesetMD, but that's mainly because Postgres works well for the type 
of analysis I do.