[OSM-talk] OSM TrustPoints

[Roland Olbricht]

Hello,

> Goal
>
> Prevent creation of new sock puppet accounts for potential acts of
> vandalism on larger scale and spam. Gradually give trust to users, and
> give them additional privileges. It should not be in the way when new
> users want to contribute normally. It should not encourage competition
> so that itself doesn't become an abuse target.

Well, in the way described, it will conflict with a couple of legitimate use 
cases. Is there a real vandalism problem on the map? Although I've been 
working for almost a year with a lot of the map data, I have not seen any 
piece of intentional vandalism.

>     * allow larger daily bbox for changes

A couple of weeks ago, I discovered that the subway stations in Roma are 
incomplete, so I added stations to my best knowledge.

Or, an even more opposed case: A couple of day ago somebody added arabic names 
to all the coutries. I would consider this as a legitimate use, but it 
invokes almost the entire planet.

>     * allow more daily edits (number of affected nodes, ways...)

Even something simple like the bus route I've added yesterday might easily 
touch more than a hundred elements. On the other hand, you could damage 
significantly the map with less than a hundred destructive edits.

>     * Regular editing activity

I personally do a lot of mapping in my holidays, so a pattern like massive 
activity from time to time will appear from the system's point of view. On 
the other hand, it is easy to tune the amount of activity of a malicious bot 
to any pattern expected by the server as "regular".

>     * Track uploads

There might be a lot of use cases, e.g. naming things, adding POIs, bus routes 
and so on that require no GPX data at all.

>     * Regular activity in other systems? (mailing lists, forums, wiki,
> svn repository, diary/blog, trac...) Perhaps totally different systems
> shouln't be mixed - one who can program or is very vocal doesn't
> necessarily yet know how to map well and shouldn't be trusted with
> enormous imports and vice versa)

This makes contributing even more complicated. Why should I be forced to use 
these frills? There might be users who can't contribute something useful in 
one or more of the above systems (What should a non-programmer contribute to 
the SVN Repository? Should every user write wiki pages that nobody wants to 
read, just to display honest acitivity?) or just aren't interested in certain 
tools (not everybody wants to blog).

>     * Rated by other users (manualy: reverted changesets, reported
> spam in diary, getting comments to a diary entry while not being
> flagged as spam...) ?

Oh, sounds like the eBay reputation system. Do we really want to have an 
intervention by lawyers which comments are admissible and which aren't?

An implementation of the whole idea would not only take a lot of ressources of 
the implementers, but also affect significanty normal users. The way mappers 
and other users use the system in a legitimate way is so widespread that any 
reputation system would end up bullying a smaller or bigger fraction of the 
users. Remember that the API has intentionally been kept small to make usage 
simple. On the other hand, there is no strong need to prevent vandalism 
because there is only sparse vandalism. So I would suggest to keep the whole 
concept away from the map.

Cheers,
Roland