[OSM-newbies] How to deal with unresponsive new users?

[SomeoneElse]

Bráulio wrote:
>
> I too have a problem with a "new" user. I say "new" because he is not 
> new, but he is doing the same mistakes newbies do again and again 
> (with the confidence of a veteran). And now he is destroying a lot of 
> relations on my city/state and substituting them with lots of 
> polygons. The worst thing is that some of these were from the time we 
> could trace from Yahoo! Imagery and where Bing has no coverage yet. 
> And I am sure he doesn't even live here, since he never added a 
> specific POI or street name, only things which he can see on the 
> aerial images.
>

One possible suggestion (if you haven't already tried it) - have a word 
with other mappers locally, and get one or more of those to send him a 
polite message too.   That way they can be sure that it's not just "one 
other person has a problem with my mapping".

If they're mapping just from aerial images, perhaps neither English nor 
Portuguese is their first language?  Maybe the OSM changesets list (or 
even something like http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/oooc ) would help to 
suggest what that might be?

Another possibility (but this rather assumes they're both seeing and 
understanding the messages they're sent) is to suggest that they ask 
questions about "how to do xyz" via the newbies list or the "help" 
site.  That way the message is less "please don't do X" it's "how can we 
help you to do Y".  It's unfortunately all too easy to misread a message 
sent with the best of intentions into something negative - and positive 
messages are less likely to get ignored.

None of this is guaranteed to work, of course, but may be worth a try...

Cheers,
Andy