[Talk-us] My personal Difficult USA Mapper situation update

[Sam Iacullo]

Hello all,

This email will be divided into two parts. The first contains specifics
about the email that touched off the discussion about mapper issues, which
I will call "COMPLAINT'. If you want to skip this section for my
opinion/commentary about the issue at large, you can scroll down to "MY TWO
CENTS"

COMPLAINT
Since my personal situation apparently lit up a bit of a firestorm, I'd
just like to bring to light exactly what happened in my situation. In the
spirit of keeping this entire discussion public, my request for him to
refrain from editing things that were already edited was such.


>On 2012-10-31 07:06:15 UTC homeslice60148 wrote: This is the second time
you have ruined hours of work that I have put into my map with bots.
Please, please, stop using bots, and stay out of places you don't live in
and have no knowledge of.

  >>On 31 October 2012 at 12:00 UTC NE2 wrote: What the fuck are you
talking about?
>>On 31 October 2012 at 12:01 UTC NE2 wrote: Wait, you mean this?
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/131637116 Why the hell would you
use a secondary to get between a motorway and a primary? It's you that's
ruining work by changing every frontage road to secondary.

>>>On 1 November 2012 at 22:26 UTC homeslice60148 wrote: From the Texas OSM
wiki: "Primary: A highway that is a main thoroughfare or links larger
cities and that does not meet any higher criteria. Business route through
cities. May be multi-lane and have a lot of business’. A very busy and
important road. 55mph or greater speed limit except in urban areas. In
rural areas probably has shoulders or breakdown lanes. This covers State
Highways.

>>>Secondary: Urban arterials that connect to higher highway networks.
Rural highways that connects smaller cities although may not be the most
traveled route. Less busy than Primary with fewer business’. Blvd, Ave,
most city thorough fairs, freeway feeder roads in urban areas, hard paved,
striped, 2 or more lanes in each direction of travel, may or may not be
divided and/or one-way, 45-55mph or greater. May or may not have shoulders.
Grade crossings controlled by traffic lights with few if any stop signs."

>>>By this very specific definition, the very vast majority of access roads
in Texas are secondary roads. I do not expect you to know this, since you
do not live in the state, and from the situation we had together in
January, you have not read (or have read and disregarded) the common
practices of mapping in this area. The road level system DOES NOT mean that
the road between a motorway and a primary MUST be a primary. This is nearly
the exact same problem we had in January.

For those who do not know, there was another issue we had together in
January where NE2 went around the entire state Farm-To-Market highway
system and used bots to delete a MASSIVE amount of information (some edits
were so severe that he just left a ref number and a highway tag) with no
regard to the standard of tagging roads as per the Texas wiki. That's where
it stands as of this minute.


Now that's gone over, time for "MY TWO CENTS"

It is my personal opinion that the "Open" part of OSM is a double-edged
sword. The ease of data entry and usage, along with the flexibility of the
project as a whole are the core of what OSM is about. Since mapping with
OSM involves following "guidelines" more than actual rules or laws, there
is no system of "punishment". Just to be clear, I am NOT advocating a
system of justice, or laws, but there does seem to be a need for
regulation. However, the more regulation and enforcement that are involved,
the more restrictive the system becomes. Some of my ideas:

-Gradually "unlocking" the world to new users (Since OSM is about mapping
the areas we know best, start with a fixed radius around the person's home.
This could involve a tutorial of sorts, such as, "This is your street. Are
the spellings correct? Is there a speed limit? Is it lit at night? Are
there houses or other buildings? Are there addresses?" etc. After a certain
amount of time/tutorials passed, the amount of data, or the ability to
delete data could be unlocked by the user? I would have no idea as to how
to rank the validity of these new edits, but maybe linking them to a
"buddy" existing user with experience? This would promote local community
building, and improve not only the quality of the map, but the quantity.

-Having a system of moderators based on areas of knowledge. (Say in
descending order of power, "Local resident, former resident, tourist," etc.
I will use myself for this example. I currently live in San Antonio, TX but
I have lived in Madison, Wisconsin.  Should I edit an area in Madison, an
"alert" of the changeset could be sent to a local resident to review and
can give feedback to my username. Their review would not be an
accept/reject level, but if the edit is ranked very poor, this could be
noted in the offending user's profile. There could also be restrictions
based on deleting/editing existing data vs. adding new data based on the
person's "knowledge" of the area. This could also limit large-scale data
edits or changesets with very large bounding boxes to those who are
trusted/verified by admins. On the downside, this opens the door to rogue
admins and or moderators, but maybe there could be additional safeguards
put in place.

-However, none of this could be possible without a system of user ranking.
Feedback, types/validity of edits, ability to "buddy" users, edit larger
areas, etc. could all be rolled into this. There would need to be some sort
of leveling system built into this.

I've been thinking about this for a long time, but have not brought them up
because the need for them didn't seem to be there. However, with my email
to the US group earlier this week showed that I am not necessarily alone in
thinking that there needs to be some sort of additional levels of
moderators. I realize that most of my ideas are impossible to implement,
especially retroactively. Part of the beauty of OSM is that the mappers are
mostly self-policing, but the ease of editing large amounts of data has
shown that a few number of people can have a large impact.

Sam Iacullo

San Antonio, TX
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20121101/a54002b3/attachment-0001.html>