[OSM-talk] RR8 - Possible International Vandal

Mike Harris mikh43 at googlemail.com
Fri Sep 4 09:25:39 BST 2009


Peter

Excellent summary - very well balanced. I would get particularly suspicious
of motivation where there was no response to courteous attempts to get in
touch to discuss.

Slight word of caution on the thought of not being expert in both 'Ireland'
and 'Iceland' for example. I hope to be just as competent (or not!) when on
vacation in 'Peru' as when near home base in 'Algeria' - although I would be
more cautious when on vacation (no local knowledge) I would hope that the
gpx traces would be as good and - hopefully - as useful and my level of
experience (or not!) much the same.

Would be good to have this on the wiki.

Mike Harris
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Miller [mailto:peter.miller at itoworld.com] 
> Sent: 03 September 2009 22:58
> To: Someoneelse
> Cc: OSM Talk
> Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] RR8 - Possible International Vandal
> 
> 
> On 3 Sep 2009, at 22:17, Someoneelse wrote:
> 
> > Frederik Ramm wrote:
> >> ... But I really need people familiar with the region who tell me 
> >> that they are reasonably sure that the edits are bogus.
> >
> > If it helps, I've just looked at a selection of 20 of the 60 ways 
> > edited in changeset 2308178 by RR8.  This covers north 
> Nottinghamshire 
> > in England.  One edit looks possibly correct (a road number 
> has been 
> > continued from an adjacent stretch of road; it's possible that that 
> > that could be legitimate, the other 19 edits do not look 
> likely to be 
> > valid
> 
> >
> > I've added an entry to the table in
> > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/GB_revert_request_log
> > as that's been suggested as a way of keeping track of requests.
> >
> > I've looked at a smaller number of ways in other changesets 
> by RR8 in 
> > the surrounding area (Derby / Notts / Sheffield).  All look 
> similarly 
> > suspect.
> >
> >> Just because someone made bogus edits in Iceland doesn't 
> >> automatically mean he's messing up Ireland as well etc.
> >
> > It certainly looks like he/she/it is messing up Northern England.
> 
> I think we need to agree on some guidance for response to 
> possible vandals and what level of checking should be 
> performed prior to reversion.
> 
> Personally I would suggest:-
> 
> 1) We should expect that all contributors should at all time 
> attempt to make good, accurate and well researched changes
> 2) We need to ensure that every contributor is on-balance 
> making the dataset better, not worse. If the contribution is 
> in doubt we owe it to other contributors to investigate and respond.
> 3) We should be aware that people make mistakes, need time to 
> learn and newbies often need and will respond to support
> 4) We can request, but not require contributors to add a 
> comments to their changesets and to have created a useful 
> personal page with some details about their interest and 
> knowledge. Doing this makes reversion less likely and make it 
> more likely that the person will be helped if needed.
> 5) In the event that someone seems to be doing strange edits 
> one should initially assume 'good faith' but should watch 
> carefully and discuss with others if appropriate.
> 6) If a significant number of edits to ways can be 
> definitively proved to be malicious, obscene, libelous or it 
> is considered that they might bring the project into 
> disrepute then the related change-sets can be reverted 
> immediately without discussion and without 100% checking of 
> the rest of the change-set.
> 7) If the edits are dubious but it can't be proved to be 
> incorrect then one should contact the person and ask for some 
> additional information. If one don't get a reasonable 
> response (or gets no
> response) and the dubious edits continue and there are not a 
> good number of balancing clearly positive contributions then 
> one should look to prove at least one bad edit and may then 
> come to the decision in discussion with others that it is 
> appropriate to revert the change- set in question and 
> potentially all changesets by that person.
> 8) Once someone has been identified as a problematic 
> contributor then one only needs to perform a brief of 
> inspection of subsequent edits before reversion future 
> changesets. Liam123 is in this category now.
> 9) If the problem continues (Liam123 is actually probably in this
> category) then one puts then on 'virtual ban' where their 
> edits get reverted with no inspection of the merit of the 
> changes unless the person contacts a sys-admin and says they 
> have grown-up and want another chance.
> 10) I someone performs bad edits in any part of the world 
> then they can expect to be a global response because it seems 
> very unlikely that someone would mess with Ireland and do 
> good work in Iceland and I am not sure I would want to work 
> out what was going on in their head - I would prefer to 
> protect the good work of others from mischief that allow good 
> work to be messed on the off-chance that some good edits are 
> also made in amongst the nonsense.
> 11) People who revert other people's work should expect to be 
> able to demonstrate that the reversion was well reasoned and 
> proportionate to the issue.
> 
> Can we work on this a little on the list and if there is agreement  
> copy to resulting text to the wiki?
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> 
> Peter
> 
> 
> 
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Andy
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > talk mailing list
> > talk at openstreetmap.org
> > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
> 
> 
> 
> 





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