[Talk-GB] Liam123 back again - can we check if this is vandalism?

[Peter Miller]

On 3 Sep 2009, at 23:15, Mark Williams wrote:

> David Earl wrote:
>> On 03/09/2009 14:53, Peter Miller wrote:
>>> This looks like messing with a street and yahoo photography shows  
>>> it  as going through a house. This appears to be straight forward  
>>> vandalism
>>> http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/5215590
>> Yes, looking at the Yahoo images, I agree completely.
>> I'm going to revert these two changesets now.
>> I suggest we waste no more time on this guy - we revert all his  
>> future changesets immediately until such time as he talks to us,  
>> and stop worrying about the minutiae of whether he's doing valid  
>> edits or not.
>> David
>
> +1
>
> He has done loads & I have seen none with merit, lots of utter  
> nonsense & some sneaky. If I could twit-list edits he'd have been  
> there for months.

Here is a copy of a post to just put talk[1] which suggests how to  
grade contributors leading to a 'delete' immediately and don't even  
check their work (which is where we seem to be with Liam123 and I  
don't disagree about that at all.

Post on talk follows...

I think we need to agree on some guidance for response to possible  
vandals and what level of checking should be performed prior to  
reversion. I would add a rider to it now, which is that in the final  
stage one concludes that it would be safest for the project to remove  
all the other work they did which was not already been reverted and  
for which one gave them the benefit of the doubt. Here is the post....

Personally I would suggest:-

1) We should expect that all contributors should at all time attempt  
to make good, accurate and well researched changes
2) We need to ensure that every contributor is on-balance making the  
dataset better, not worse. If the contribution is in doubt we owe it  
to other contributors to investigate and respond.
3) We should be aware that people make mistakes, need time to learn  
and newbies often need and will respond to support
4) We can request, but not require contributors to add a comments to  
their changesets and to have created a useful personal user page with  
some details about their interest and knowledge. Doing this makes  
reversion less likely and make it more likely that the person will be  
helped if needed.
5) In the event that someone seems to be doing strange edits one  
should initially assume 'good faith' but should watch carefully and  
discuss with others if appropriate.
6) If a significant number of edits to ways can be definitively proved  
to be malicious, obscene, libelous or it is considered that they might  
bring the project into disrepute then the related change-sets can be  
reverted immediately without discussion and without 100% checking of  
the rest of the change-set.
7) If the edits are dubious but it can't be proved to be incorrect  
then one should contact the person and ask for some additional  
information. If one doesn't get a reasonable response (or gets no  
response) and the dubious edits continue and there are not a good  
number of balancing clearly positive contributions then one should  
look to prove at least one bad edit and may then come to the decision  
in discussion with others that it is appropriate to revert the change- 
set in question and potentially all changesets by that person.
8) Once someone has been identified as a problematic contributor then  
one only needs to perform a brief of inspection of subsequent edits  
before reversion future changesets. Liam123 is in this category now.
9) If the problem continues (Liam123 is actually probably in this  
category) then one puts then on 'virtual ban' where their edits get  
reverted with no inspection of the merit of the changes unless the  
person contacts a sys-admin and says they have grown-up and want  
another chance.
10) If someone performs bad edits in any part of the world then they  
can expect to be a global response because it seems very unlikely that  
someone would mess with Ireland and do good work in Iceland and I am  
not sure I would want to work out what was going on in their head - I  
would prefer to protect the good work of others from mischief that  
allow good work to be messed on the off-chance that some good edits  
are also made in amongst the nonsense.
11) People who revert other people's work should expect to be able to  
demonstrate that the reversion was well reasoned and proportionate to  
the issue.

Can we work on this a little on the list and if there is agreement  
copy to resulting text to the wiki?

[1] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2009-September/041553.html

Regards,


Peter



>
> Mark
>