[Osmf-talk] Decisions taken during the 2023-09-28 OSMF board meeting

[Andy Townsend]

On 29/09/2023 22:04, Pierre-Léo Bourbonnais wrote:
> However, I did not see how the OSMF and the DWG plan to deal with 
> banned users creating multiple accounts so they can edit and vandalize 
> data again.


I previously raised 
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/4206 about 
this issue.

See also 
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/4198 (rate 
by limiting IP and canonical email address), although in the case of 
your vandal I don't think that their rate of account creation will be 
affected by that.  However:


> This last year I lost tens of hours reverting changes of a child that 
> was adding fantasy motorways and since he connected them to the rest 
> of the road network, it could have caused accidents or at least 
> generate big routing errors for routing engines and map end-users.

There are a few different ways that this sort of thing could be detected 
- a simple overpass query of "the number of motorways in $province" 
would be a start.  Others might include detecting large changes in 
journey time from X to Y.

Detecting problematic changes to data at this level _do not_ require 
changes to the osm.org website, or admin rights to the osm.org 
database.  They would however require _you_ to do something - but as 
almost everything else in OpenStreetMap is done by volunteers that seems 
entirely in keeping with the rest of the project.


>
> I would like to know what will be done in the future to reduce the 
> vandalizing reverting burden for us fellow editors and when the OSMF 
> and DWG will enable a wikipedia-like reviewing system for new members 
> and/or setup a way to protect some regions of the globe or some names 
> from being changed or deleted by new users.

Enforced "limited access for a period of time" has been discussed in 
some detail at 
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/how-about-limit-new-accounts/101656 
- see e.g. my comment 
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/how-about-limit-new-accounts/101656/6 
there.  However, there is a long way between me saying "I’m sure that a 
technical restriction could be placed" and someone actually adding that 
it to the website - either someone needs to volunteer to make such as 
change or volunteer to pay someone to make such as change, and that 
change has to be approved by the maintainers of the website.

In your example I suspect that the level of vandalism is fairly 
straightforward to deal with on an "as it happens" basis, and I'd 
encourage you to look into automatic methods of detecting it, as 
mentioned above.


>
> I am sure you will have to implement such a system in the near future 
> especially after all the russian name removing global edit wars that 
> occurred recently, so I would like to get the timeline for this.

That's actually a very different sort of vandalism, both in intent and 
in scale.  I do somewhat agree with ZeLonewolf's forum posts at 
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/how-about-limit-new-accounts/101656/130 
and 
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/seeking-comment-on-latest-revision-of-osmf-strategic-plan/102596/14 
, although I suspect that they somewhat underestimate the skillsets that 
OSM volunteers already have.

There has been some discussion about detecting and acting more quickly 
on "first non-empty changesets" such as 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/139001651 , but "retriction" 
rather than "detection" needs "someone needs to volunteer to make such 
as change or volunteer to pay someone to make such as change" as 
mentioned above.

Best Regards,

Andy (from the DWG, but writing in a personal capacity)