[OSM-talk] OSM TrustPoints

[Stefan Baebler]

Hi!

First, some clarifications:

The possible measures and use limitations were only provided as an
example what can be observed and measured and what could be limited
before earning enough trust in a wat that would be much more effective
and less annoying than captchas. It was not a specific proposal, but
listing possibilities to spark the debate. Probably not all measures
and all limitations are needed and proposals for improvements are
welcome.

We don't need to implement every feature from every example site, but
we have the chance to review those tried examples and see how their
system would work for us, and pick only the best features.

Now some specific issues:

Fixing subway stations in Rome wouldn't be prohibited to newcomers if
they limit themselves for that day to Rome, encouraging them to focus
on an area rather than jumping around the globe changing things (True
value of OSM is _local_ knowledge!). They could be first only allowed
to map within some kilometers around their home, but that might be too
restrictive and demotivating. As for number of daily affected nodes
the number shouldn't be too low, but low enough to prevent moving or
deleting whole cities (whether accidental or malicious) or importing
some data without consulting the community (about legal and technical
issues) and having some help from experienced members.

Let's admit that adding Arabic names to all countries isn't something
a newcomer would be doing in his first months.

Due to seasonal mapping (eg. only during summer) we could prolong the
time after which points start to decay, or make it significantly
slower or drop decaying altogether. Although after some consecutive
years of no activity it might be safe to pronounce someone dead (in
terms of further OSM contributions, at least for statistical reasons).

For simplicity's sake and easier understanding points could be
summarized in at most 5 discrete levels, and additional rights given
to users according to those levels. Levels could be stated in place
where that is needed, eg. mappers near me, so i know who i can ask
some local mapping question, probably also shown in profiles (publicly
or jut to account owners). Better support for mentoring could also be
very good thing.

Involving other systems wouldn't mean a user has to use all of them,
but perhaps 2 of them constructively and not doing extremely annoying
things in others to be considered more trusted. This would also allow
people to shift focus (eg editing wiki in winter) while maintaining
their points or even gaining new ones.
Here even map editing api, track uploads and diaries could be
considered as separate systems.

Randomly checked changesets also seem nice. But it might be hard to
check the first mapper in a blan area

Spam in diaries is existing fact. Volume is orders of magnitude lower
than in email but even that could be eliminated or filtering can be
crowdsourced without annoying admins (while still annoying those that
encounter it before it is tagged by enough people).

Overall, there should be very low threshold before user is given
almost the same permissions as now (curently no limits,so even a new
sock puppet account could be used to import some commercial maps in
hopes of "legalizing" them this way for their use), starting with a
limited set of rights, and very trusted ones would get additional
powers.

There were also some comments in wiki [1] and additional example site
[2] was given there, so please let us not disregard those in further
discussion.
Also we should give people at SOTM some time to digest their mails and
give some opinions. They are hopefully using their time there for
better things than reading email :)

Stefan

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User_talk:Stefanb/TrustPoints
[2] http://stackoverflow.com/faq#reputation