[OSM-talk] Wikipedia/Wikidata admins cleanup

[Andy Townsend]

On 05/01/17 12:23, mikel at groundtruth.in wrote:
> * Mikel Maron * +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron
> ... As Frederik said, better reporting and processing can benefit DWG. 
> This is something I want to spend time on.

I think that it's important that how we do this sort of thing as a 
project is discussed in whatever public forums are available (and right 
now the "most international" one we have is this talk list, alongside 
the other widely-used international community forums for different 
languages over at forum.osm.org such as the DE and RU forums there).

Your "Reverts should be held to the same standard as imports..." post 
above may have been something of a dog-whistle response to Frederik's 
post, but when I read things that talk about "the current revert regime" 
and say "Reverts should be held to the same standard as imports" and 
"well documented and visible plan" I read it as meaning "I want you to 
stop doing what you are currently doing in the way that you are doing 
it", and want to understand why.

I'd much rather the direction on this came from the community rather 
than the board (and yes, there will obviously be as many different views 
as there are OSM mappers).  If "the communication I've seen from 
community members making reverts has left a lot of rough feelings" then 
let's talk about it (for a start; which particular actions are we 
talking about?  Was the data that was removed added when it shouldn't 
have been (for e.g. license reasons) and are we just talking about the 
tone of the conversation, or something else?

Activities such as https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/44923663 (to 
take an example revert action from me yesterday) are going to become 
more common as more people use OSM.  In this case the sequence of events 
was detect the problem, revert the vandalism, block the user and request 
that an admin delete the account (which was created just for that 
purpose).  I'd argue that those actions (apart from block the user) 
should be able to be carried out by anyone familiar enough with OSM to 
recognise the problem, and we should actually encourage everyone in that 
position to do so - providing that they can recognise the difference 
between obvious vandalism (as happened here) and a business owner unable 
to get the hang of editing and renaming something nearby by mistake.  I 
don't think that "a well documented and visible plan" would help here, 
unless that plan said "if you see something wrong, please take 
appropriate action to fix it" (which I've always thought was the 0th 
rule of OSM anyway).  Anything too bureaucratic would just slow down the 
fixing of problems.

There are lots of interested parties in OSM - all the way from 
individuals like me who 8 years ago were just looking for somewhere to 
store stuff from an old GPS (a route of footpaths and villages across 
Wales, as it happens) up through large non-profit and for-profit 
corporations, all of whom contribute greatly to the OSM ecosystem.  On a 
personal note with the DWG I've found that the large organisations can 
generally look after themselves, and there's a role for standing up for 
the "little guy", whether it's a new mapper in an established community 
or (as in the SADR case upthread) an attempt to remove a country - for 
some definition of country - from the map.  It's important that as a 
community we talk to each other and listen to what everyone else has to 
say, especially when (as in the "wikidata" case) everyone has the best 
interests of the project at heart, just different visions of what those 
best interests are.

Best Regards,

Andy

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