[OSM-talk] Interesting cases of vandalism?

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2013/2/22 Toby Murray <toby.murray at gmail.com>:
> 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.


I can confirm this, all replies I ever got from people which I asked
about their deletions from the map were saying that they hadn't
understood they were editing the main official database. Usually they
wanted a "clean" printout and therefore deleted some POIs in the way,
or others drew a motorway zigzag over the city center.

Other kind of "vandalism" are mappers who want to "correct" perceived
errors (they prefer different tags, or they have read in the wiki that
a certain tag is "deprecated" and so they delete these tags or change
them to other tags (that are maybe not in broader use)). This is
partly also happening where it wouldn't be necessary from a technical
point of view (different keys), but some mappers think that there
should be _one_ main key describing an object so they remove
"deprecated" tags as duplicates (an example would be highway=bus_stop
vs. public_transport tags).

Yet another kind of "vandalism" (or maybe better spam) is created
intentionally by people in order to promote certain businesses, e.g. a
dance club where tourism=attraction is added.

cheers,
Martin