[Talk-us] NE2 changing my work with bots again

Toby Murray toby.murray at gmail.com
Wed Oct 31 19:05:58 GMT 2012


On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 2:04 AM, Sam Iacullo <sjiacullo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well all, he's at it again. I had an issue with user NE2 a while ago
> involving his running of bots changing a bunch of highways that I had worked
> on here in Texas. Apparently, he's back at it again, and it's worse than
> just Texas. He changed many, many things on roads that I had worked hours on
> (changing secondary to trunk, deleting and changing names, etc.) in ways
> that just seem arbitrary. This has happened on more than just one occasion,
> but the majority of the damage has been on changeset 13246406.
>
> Apparently he had been running random "post-redaction cleanup" bots on areas
> that did not need to be edited. Since this is the second problem that I have
> had personally with him, I don't understand why there is no
> rating/banning/formal complaint system in OSM. The section written about
> "armchair mapping" was a direct result of him, and he's in direct violation
> of that. Is there anything that can be done about him?

Yeah, he made a "post-redaction cleanup" run through Kansas
interstates even though there was no license related cleanup needed. I
think he just ran through the entire interstate system after the
license bot hit and he did clean up a lot of problems. Most of the
changes here were harmless so I didn't worry about it too much. I did
revert a silly FIXME tag that he put on a way based on a patch of
fuzzy aerial imagery. But at least it was just a FIXME and not a
change to the actual data.

The other thing he has been doing lately is creating route relations
for historic highways that don't exist any more. Example:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/2401488

While I'm not entirely opposed to having old highways in the database
and this information is of interest to many people, it doesn't seem
like our data model lends itself to keeping such information accurate.
The information is too static. For example I recently realigned part
of Kansas highway 18 because of major construction. They completely
razed the entire area down to dirt, shifted the highway by a couple
hundred feet and are building up a new network of link roads. In order
to leave the old US 40 relation with the correct geometry, I would
have to leave the old ways in place and mark them as highway=abandoned
(which NE2 has done in some places) and then create new ways for the
new construction. That's just not how OSM works. Our data evolves with
the real world. If there were a way to create a relation which
contained only a specific version of a way, it would be an entirely
different matter... Is that on the API v0.7 wishlist page yet? :)

Toby



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