[Talk-us] Undiscussed mass-revert by user Nakaner-repair

[Andy Townsend]

On 20/04/2018 16:13, Ian Dees wrote:
>
> Some questions:
>
> Was this action made under the auspices of the Data Working Group?

No

> Has the "directed mapping" policy been approved by the OSMF?

No, although the refusal to interact with other mappers and the mass 
creation of sock-puppet accounts to avoid doing so would I think qualify 
under the ban policy https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Ban_Policy .

To be clear - there are a number of different mappers here.  They appear 
to be using the same customised copy of iD; we don't know what imagery 
they're using or whether it's licence-compatible with OSM (I suspect 
based on comments that at least some isn't, but can't be sure).  The 
mappers involved have been less than informative about who they're 
working for (of course, they may not actually know who this is - I'm 
guessing that this is organised through a "mechanical turk"-type site).  
They should, at least, be able to say what rules they are following 
though - and none of them that I have seen has given a reply that 
explains that yet (see for example 
https://openstreetmap.org/changeset/58023538 ).

Throughout this process I've tried to engage with each of the mappers 
involved (see the top of 
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussion-comments?uid=61942&commented 
for examples) but have generally failed to do so.

Their changes have been of mostly two sorts - "fixing routing problems" 
and "missing service roads".  The "fixing routing problems" was reported 
on talk-gb initially where at a guess 80% of the access changes were in 
error - a typical example is 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/57929974 , where an access 
restriction was changed because whatever rules they were following 
simply did not understand it.  The German forum thread also found many 
issues caused by "fixing routing problems" in Germany.

The US situation is of course different - there are few access 
restrictions that might impede motor traffic mapped (and probably fewer 
physically per mile of road too).  Many more of the US edits were of the 
"missing service roads" type, and there's generally less to go wrong 
there (although these do still warrant checking - I suspect that in 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/57730894 the assumption is that 
people drive on the left in Washington). Interestingly I note that in 
that mapper's case (see 
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussion-comments?uid=7511407 ) the 
revert excluded North and South America, so there are still errors 
introduced by that particular mapper than need fixing.  Other problems 
in the US include mapping roads likely to be private as 
residential/unclassified, which will cause some "interesting" routing, 
but that's a smaller subset.

One thing that would really help here would be if anyone has any idea 
who's behind this mapping to ask them to say who they are (either to the 
DWG, or to the communities in the places that they are editing).  Given 
the concentration on places like LA and Denver it's likely to be someone 
who wants to do last-mile motor vehicle routing in the US.  It's clear 
that they need a bit of help about how access tags in OSM work 
(including access not for motor vehicles) and I'm sure that lots of 
people in the OSM community would like to help with that.  The current 
situation (leaving comments for mappers, having those comments ignored, 
being blocked temporarily for ignoring comments, creating sock-puppet 
accounts, rinse and repeat) is clearly not satisfactory.

Best Regards,

Andy