[Rebuild] Incredible Self-Vandalism

[Gnonthgol]

Den 3. aug. 2012 kl. 18.41 skrev cenSORINg:

>  
> Some days ago an act of SELF-VANDALISM was performed by the OSM coordinators themselves. Under the claim that they wanted to brush off non-licenced data, they damaged or destroyed millions of kms of roads or lines, also points and areas/polygons. Most of the data they destroyed was legitimate! (input by "licenced" contributors)  That has happened because of the stupidly designed bot. Here are some examples of catastrophic results of the stupid algorithm designed by incompetent analysts:

Well that is a bold claim. Lets see where you think the bot is "stupidly designed" so that we might fix it.

> 1. The town of Negrești (RO) (http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=46.835&lon=27.4712&zoom=12&layers=M) (as a map point) was deleted. Probably the mapper who first generated the point was unlicenced. Later, a bot designed by Romanian licenced users put on the map all the Romanian localities with a lot of other data (such as the census). Because the 1st contribution was unlicenced, every later contribution was deleted even if it was licenced. (After all, what licence do you need to name a town on the map??) The stupid algorithm didn't consider that the later contributions confirmed and reinforced (therefore, "licenced") the former contribution. Many localities were deleted like that.

So in the event that a non-acceptor added a node for a town and therefore comes with the information that "town xyz is here" and then an acceptor adds other information to that node "town xyz have so many inhabitants", the only information that we can use is from the second editor. The bot now knows how many inhabitants town xyz have, but have no clue where it is. And apparently no osm contributor knows this either since these problems have showed up on several maps and tools in the last ~6 months with all the remapping that have been done, and no one have done anything to this node in that time.

> 2. If an unlicensed member interrupted a valid highway to mark a bridge, that way is now with that fragment missing. Thousands of roads are now chopped in this way. The stupid bot didn’t even care to restore the continuous highways the way they were before the bridge insertion. Now the routing is damaged.

Assuming that no one had edited the highways since the non-acceptor and assuming that restoring the ways as it was before would have been the right way and assuming no non-acceptor have ever deleted anything that should remain deleted, it is possible that the bot could have restored the objects to a previous state. However this would have caused a lot of extra ways and artifacts that had been deleted by non-acceptors that we do not want and maybe broken the map even more then it is now. Again this kinds of problems have clearly been marked on all tools that showed what the redaction bot was going to do, and is still showing on new tools that are made to find exactly these kinds of problems.

> More stupid outcome: if you try now to repair that road’s continuity by re-adding the deleted bridge, you are in big trouble, because OSM threatens you that you ARE NOT ALLOWED to “restore” (in a precise manner) what the stupid bot has deleted! If the bot deleted something like this:
> [pointA-to-pointB]
> Tags:
> bridge = yes
> highway = secondary
> … the actual situation will lead you to re-insert exactly the same data! The bridge didn’t move. Or shall we slightly change the points’ coordinates so they don’t match the infamous deleted info?

You or the one that told you that may have misinterpreted that a bit. You are not allowed to look at the data that was added by a non-acceptor and restore the map from that. But if you know that that section is a bridge or can find that out by surveying the area or looking at datasources we have permission to use like bing images or landsat, then you can add that to the map without infringing the copyright of the non-acceptor.

> 3. One of the causes for this unbelievable mess lies deeper in the silly design of the very OSM HISTORY. One example of the rot:
> 
> - Member A (having agreed to the licence) makes a way, a road between Paris and Geneva. That would be "version 1".
> - Member B (not having agreed to the license) decides for some reason to split the way at Dijon. Now the initial way has become 2 ways.
> - Fragment A (Paris-Dijon) will be "version 2" of the initial way and will list contributors A and B, but fragment B (Dijon-Geneva) will be considered a new way (so "version 1") and ALL the contribution of member A to this fragment will be not recognized any more!
> - Then there comes the stupid bot and deletes the "unlicenced" fragment B, mocking the work of member A as well as of any user of the map.
> This way millions of "legitimate" kms of ways have been destroyed. 

If an acceptor splits way B into way B v2 and way C v1 then we do not want to restore way A v1 as that would be the completely wrong thing to do. There are many situations where restoring the original data is completely the opposite of what you want to do. There is no way to make any bot, no matter how smart it is or how smart the creators are that can handle every situation perfect. The best option is for humans to check out the problems that is impossible for machines to judge and make the judgements themselves. Again this is what the entire osm community have been doing for the last ~6 months and are continuing to do. These problems have shown up on all the remapping tools, and is still showing up on the new tools. The nodes are still present and you can restore the way from the nodes so the work of the original contributor is not all lost.

> Don't think these examples are minor. Multiply them by 10000 and understand the bombardment effect on the shredded map. I am sure other contributors may give a lot of examples of other catastrophic results of this unbelievable terrorist act.

I do not think anyone thinks that these examples are minor, but comparing them to a terrorist attack are completely out of line. No lives were lost. No one got hurt. And no one were terrorized by the bot. We are not trying to ruin the map, we are just trying to fix it, and the license was a much bigger problem then the problems that were caused by deleting 1% of the data on the map. It may not look like that now but I think it was worth it despite the major damage that was caused temporarily.

> Converted maps have become useless. The OSM layers or the compatible generated maps (such as in the Garmin format) have been used by local emergency services or transportation companies. Now the converted maps have become useless or even dangerously misleading.

If anyone have started to use the map after the redaction bot they have not listened to the warnings. The replications have been moved and strong warnings have been sent out before this. A lot of commercial companies like mapquest and bing have stopped the update to their map in the redaction period and is still using old data from before the redaction bot. The only ones that are using new data is services that are used by editors, that includes all services provided by osmf and all the tools at tools.geofabrik.de. The generated maps that have been used by your local emergancy services and transportation companies are not affected by the bot unless they have actively defied the warnings.

> A lot of my 4-year long contributions are now destroyed by the stupid bot. My town and the surrounding area look now like after a bombardment. Street names that I collected with effort, one-way properties, POIs, buildings are a mess. Here is one example of what the map looks like after the brushoff (like many contributors can find in their areas): http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=47.16585&lon=27.55892&zoom=16&layers=M

Calm down, your town have not been bombarded and no physical damage have been done. Most of the street names and properties you have collected are still there. The only thing you have lost are tags you have added to ways that were the geometry is all from a decliner.

> A lot of hard work has been destroyed just because some “unlicenced” passing user only changed a point. It has killed roads, relations, transportation routes, rivers, POIs…

Moving a single point would hardly do anything. The redaction bot is smart enough not to touch data added by acceptors where that is possible. The damage to your town does not seem to be anywhere near what have been done to Los Angles, Poland or Australia. You should have no problems fixing the problems in an hour, and get a better map then before.

> This should be a reason to stop this mockery and to try to revert the effects and maybe design a more intelligent brushoff bot. I suppose now not even some massive revert is possible, since many users have begun the repair and then there will be a lot of duplicate ways, points, polygons.

No, the licensing problems are much bigger then the problems the redaction bot have done so a revert will not be done. And user started repairing the damage a long time ago.

> I've seen there were many who clapped their hands with joy when the bot started the self-vandalism. Stop applauding. Speak up to make the responsible ones repair the damage. (So OSM contributors won't leave for Google maps in bitterness.)

The ones that were against this have spoken up a long long time ago. And they were down voted my the masses that wanted that saw the huge problems with the CC BY-SA license. We have lost some mappers to the FOSM.org fork, but the majority of the osm contributors want the license change. And most of the people can see the enormous problems with the Google maps license and their policies against the contributions from Google map maker.

Gnonthgol
Redaction bot developer

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