[Talk-us] NYC Name Vandalism

Rihards richlv at nakts.net
Fri Aug 31 09:58:00 UTC 2018


On 2018.08.30. 23:20, Kevin Kenny wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 10:39 AM Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Yes, the original harmful edit was made by user "MedwedianPresident" in changeset https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61555047 20 days ago. It was then reverted by naoliv a day later: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61556585.
>>
>> naoliv also blocked the user: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/2141
> 
> Many thanks to the hopelessly overloaded DWG for handling this.
> 
> A problem here is that it gives us a tremendous black eye in the
> press.  I wonder how, moving forward, we can lessen the chances of
> this sort of hate speech propagating off the project. Other projects
> have found that having a mandatory review and moderation process for
> new users is helpful, because the sort of person who leaves this sort
> of mess is usually creating a one-time account to do it, rather than
> having made earlier sound contributions.

It gives us the same press as some vandals messing with wikipedia -
let's not see it as a worse thing than it is.

As a sidenote, this was detected and revert in OSM in a day. If data
consumers would update the data more frequently, the impact would be
much, much smaller (in this specific case, probably nobody would have
noticed).

> If my experience with other open-source and crowdsourced projects is
> any guide, it only takes a incident or two like this for The Powers
> That Be in many organizations to start forbidding the use of
> open-source material "because there's no quality control and too much
> legal risk."-- 
 Rihards



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