[OSM-talk] Big mess- fight or flee?

[Toby Murray]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 2:20 AM, Andrew Errington
<a.errington at lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:
> Should I...
> a) Ask someone to investigate what happened and show me what tools to use
> to recover/restore deleted data, bearing in mind that the current data
> seems to be identical and would overlap restored data?
> b) Check/re-map the areas using whatever data I have?
> c) Ignore the issue?
> d) None of the above
>
> I know that in some ways the database is 'self-healing' since mappers who
> spot discrepancies (due to whatever cause) will fix them.  But these
> errors don't need to be discovered- I know they are there (and now you do
> too!).
>
> I also wonder if there should be some mechanism to stop (or at least draw
> attention to) massive edits/deletions before too much time goes by.

There are tools to revert changesets but I think too much time has
passed since this change for them to be used easily since there will
be lots of conflicts with things that have been touched since then. If
the user had asked for help immediately when they noticed the mistake,
things could have been reverted easily.

As for detecting these changes... Do you know about OWL[1]? Although
this may not be much help since it sounds like this didn't happen in
your "home" area. You can watch change feeds from anywhere but at some
point a large enough area will start to overwhelm someone trying to
watch it.

I personally usually have a copy of LiveMapViewer[2] running at home.
Every once in a while I check on activity I see. I have found a couple
instances of new users being clueless and have been able to contact
them and resolve things quickly. I think that's about all we have at
the moment.

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OWL_(OpenStreetMap_Watch_List)
[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/LiveMapViewer

Toby