[OSM-talk] Interesting cases of vandalism?

[Toby Murray]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 7:28 AM, Mulone <mulone at rome.com> wrote:
> (Apologies for cross-posting)
>
> Hi all,
> I am an academic researcher and I am studying the issue of vandalism in
> OpenStreetMap
> (see  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vandalism
> <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vandalism>   for a general discussion).
> I am very interested in the motivations that lead users to vandalise
> OpenStreetMap.
> Can you point me to specific instances of vandalism that have an
> *identifiable reason*?
>
> Examples might include:
> - People changing borders of countries in conflict zones
> - People renaming famous places with their name/interests
> - Companies damaging data to prevent competition (such as the alleged
> vandalism by Google’s contractors)
> - People damaging symbolic places (e.g. deletion of the White House or the
> Eiffel Tower)
> - People damaging data to bully locals/other users
> - People creating imaginary places
> - People who are frustrated with the editing tools and start using them to
> damage data
>
> Thanks in advance for sharing your experiences!
> Mulone


Are you only looking at intentional vandalism? One common thing I've
seen is new users not understanding that they are editing *THE* map.
They just want to make some simplified map for an event they are doing
or something. So they delete all the rivers and some minor roads.

Toby