[OSM-talk] Making dealing with license problem objects easier

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Wed Jan 4 16:34:46 GMT 2012


David,

On 01/04/12 16:50, David Earl wrote:
> Suggestion 1
>
> I'd like to suggest we invent a tag which says "I have checked this
> object for changes by non-accepters and personally verified it against
> sources independent of the changes of those non-accepters who made
> changes", so that when that tag is added, the changes the non-accepter
> made become my responsibility.

odbl=clean is that tag, and already used by OSMI and editors. It is a 
bit questionable to use it on stuff that "I could have mapped myself". I 
suggest that odbl=clean only be added if you have indeed modified the 
object in a way that you believe obliterates any previously held 
copyright by a non-agreer.

If this has resulted in a situation where the object is now, again, in 
the same state it was before a non-agreer toched it, then you *can* 
place odbl=clean for quick results but after the next weekly planet dump 
the OSMI will (should!) pick up the situation and say "the disagreer's 
contribution is now irrelevant because none of it is present in the 
final object, so it's clean", i.e. odbl=clean is not even strictly 
necessary.

> Suggestion 2
>
> A very common pattern is
> * non-accepter adds a feature F which is joined to one or more ways W at
> node new N; this contaminates the whole of W even though all they've
> done is inserted a node into it.
> * lots of other people make changes to W in other respects, whose edits
> would be lost
>
> In this case, I think it would be reasonable to say that if N is
> inserted between two other nodes such that the three form a straight
> line (to within some fairly generous tolerance) that the way is not
> affected and the node can be removed from it along with the genuinely
> offending way without affecting the one involved as a side effect, and
> needn't be marked as such in the inspector.

Could be done, but is a fairly complicated computation. I'd rather 
someone removed the node and tagged the way odbl=clean.

> Suggestion 3
>
> There is a particularly pernicious pattern where user 'ulfl' (others
> too, but by far the most prolific) went round some years ago changing
> lots of tag names without changing anything else, and he has now
> explicitly declined the CT, so there are now lots of real changes on top
> which will be lost because of these purely mechanical changes.
>
> I think we should not count these as significant edits for the purposes
> of the license change.

Yes. I think there is a consensus that such an edit does not give you 
(enough) copyright to demand that the object is now "yours". Some people 
making such mechanical edits have been cooperative in identifying those 
of their changesets which have been mechanically created (e.g. 
balrog-kun), and we have started to compile a list of such changesets on 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WTFE (under "changeset overrides").

I have contacted ulfl a while ago asking for similar help but have not 
received a response. I reckon it is going to be down to us, then, to 
compile the list by inspecting his past changesets, or at least the 
larger ones.

I have a facility where I can enter the changeset IDs collected on the 
wiki page into OSMI, and changes from those changesets will then not be 
highlighted there or in the editors any more. This is a manual process 
and doesn't happen daily but I try to monitor the page.

Feel free to add ulfl changesets to the list if you are confident that 
they have been created mechanically.

Bye
Frederik




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