[Talk-us] "rogue" country-wide bus route edits

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

I believe this must have been discussed on the US slack but I'd like to
raise it here as well. DWG has had a number of complaints about 100%
un-responsive mappers adding and modifying bus routes across the US.
This seems to be an organised editing effort, and many different mappers
have tried to engage them about their sources and occasional problems,
but to no avail. DWG has blocked a few accounts with a short-time
"please talk to us" message, no reaction; then a longer block, then they
simply created new accounts.

DWG has not reverted the contributions by the first set of accounts, but
reverted all contributions made by the block-circumvention later
accounts as a matter of principle.

This is ongoing. The accounts blocked so far are

KhilareAB
pmy1108
MayurPatil6692
AbhiPawar
pravinmyerapale
M at YUR
pravinyerapale
Abhijitbpawar

and here is an exemplary block message:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/5125

This looks like a job where some form of public transport startup/app
has contracted a service provider to (my guess) scrape the web and add
bus routes to OSM. In theory this is an opportunity for a win-win
cooperation, but of course not if the data sources are obscure and the
mappers are absolutely unresponsive.

If anyone has an idea about who in the US startup world could be behind
this work, it would be immensely helpful to get in touch with them and
make them a productive member of the OSM community, rather than some
fly-by-night fuck-you-community-we-do-what-we-want operation whose work
we throw out on sight which is a waste of their money and a waste of our
time.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"