[Moderation] Rogue newbie mapper in Copenhagen

[Morten Kjeldgaard]

Hi,

I sent the following message to osmf-talk, but only having received a  
single reply, I am wondering whether it was the right place to send it.

In the meantime, the email exchange on talk-dk has continued, and the  
in face of even more requests to stop his actions, the rogue newbie  
appears to be even more defiant.

Cheers,
Morten (mok0)


---------

We have in the last week or so had an intense diskussion with an  
apparently rogue newbie [0] on the talk-dk list.

He presented himself as someone who had done "the massive changes" in  
the bicycle way system, and he would continue to go ahead "full speed"  
no matter what anyone said. He said that he dislikes the (legal)  
cycleway=track tags, and was going to change all those to parallel  
highway=bicycle ways. His motivation is:

> A seperat bike lane has a seperat life and should be:
>
> highway-cycleway
>
> That gives you a blue exctra line/road!

(cf. a single posting in english for some reason [1]).

His edits are indeed massive and spread over the entire Copenhagen area.

His attitude in the email discussion has been very defiant, and when  
asked to hold back for having a discussion first, he has dismissed  
that with "I am using the german and dutch method" (whatever that  
means), and "please let me know why we should not do things like it's  
done in Germany and Netherlands." He appears to ask for a discussion,  
but apparently disregards objections and insists on compliance with  
his approach.

Inspecting his work, it is obvious that it is technically of poor  
quality, and many artefacts have been introduced such as jagged  
connections to crossing side roads, bumps on T-intersections etc. I am  
suspecious that the edits are "living-room" edits without survey.

It is true that cycleways in Denmark are sometimes tagged and  
sometimes traced as parallel ways on the main road. The consensus is,  
(in my interpretation) that a cycleway is defined the way it is for  
some reason, and the decision of the original mapper should be  
respected unless you perform a new survey and/or consult with the  
original mapper.

He has not responded to other mappers' statements that the cycleway  
infrastructure in Denmark is different from some other countries, and  
that the danish mapping community has not yet settled on common  
guidelines on how
to do this.

What is the experience of the readership of this list on how to deal  
with rogue mappers? How do we decide whether or not to roll back his  
edits? Is there a specific code of conduct or guidelines for the OSM  
that can help in this regard?

I am on purpose sending to the osmf-talk list and not osm-talk or talk- 
dk because I do not want to unnecessarily fuel the fire at this point.


Regards,
Morten (mok0)

[0] http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Niels%20Beck
[1] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-dk/2009-November/000241.html

-- 
Morten Kjeldgaard  <mortenkjeldgaard at gmail.com>
Høegh-Guldbergs Gade 129
DK-8000 Århus C
Tlf: +45 8618 8180