[talk-au] OSM Notes

[Andrew Davidson]

On Wed, Mar 2, 2022 at 1:46 PM Andrew Harvey <andrew.harvey4 at gmail.com> wrote:

> For example,

> https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/2684418 a street library won't be visible on aerial imagery, you either need to confirm on the ground or use street level imagery. If it's unable to be verified remotely best to leave it open for someone on the ground to verify it.

I'm not exactly sure why this particular mapper works this way. So far
this year we have closed 503 of their notes. About 300 of them
resulted in some sort of edit to the map and another ~120 of them had
already been mapped. The other 80 are a mixture of out of date
information, comments about things that were no longer on the map,
wanting to add things that are temporary, information that was wrong,
and things that could not be confirmed. Overall we have managed to
deal successfully with 85% of their material.

Now as you have pointed out this is an active mapper and given the
nature of the notes they have created they are in effect outsourcing
their mapping to others. So far this year they will have received 500+
emails from the OSM system which means they will be well aware that
people have been processing their notes. If they think that some of
their notes have been incorrectly handled they are welcome to do their
own mapping or at least reactivate them.

I have also encountered at least another two mappers who seem to have
adopted the same method of operations, opening many notes but not
actually dealing with them.

>
> Though I realise it's not always easy and at some point it makes sense to close the note as unactionable.

This is where the problem lies. The map note system is a terrible
issues management system. All we have to play with for filtering and
managing these is location and a binary status (open/closed). So the
more notes hanging around the harder it is to manage them. You only
need to look at the note stats for Germany or the USA to see what
happens once they start to build up. So it comes down to the question
of what is the point of keeping:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/2440403

or

https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/2079710

open? They are just noise that is hiding the signal. If we had some
system of managing them then you could leave them all open, but at
present there isn't even an easy way of finding your own notes that
are still open.

>
> StreetComplete asks about open notes.

Based on the default settings it only asks about notes that are posed
as questions.