[OSM-talk] A thought on bot edits

[Christoph Hormann]

On Monday 02 October 2017, Martijn van Exel wrote:
> I find this discussion and your proposal interesting to explore, at
> least as a hypothetical. Do we know 1) what the volume of bot edits
> is and how it has grown 

No, but i thought as well this would be an interesting thing to study.  
Of course you would need to make some definition of what a bot edit is 
that can be automatically analyzed - which is difficult.  But even a 
hairy definition might allow to identify rough trends.

There is little doubt that the volume of bot edits has grown recently 
but if it has actually grown much faster than the manual editing volume 
overall is not easy to determine.  I mostly look at remote areas and 
there the raise in dominance of automated editing activities is massive 
but the manual editing activity in these areas has always been small 
and sporadic so this is certainly not an observation you can 
extrapolate to the whole.

> 2) how many mappers have actually given up 
> based upon this? 

Again i can only answer this based on my own experience and

a) I am unmotivated to map in areas where imports are in progress or 
regularly taking place (yes, i am talking about Canada).
b) My primary motivation for mapping in OSM is that what i map gets 
improved by other craft mappers so what we produce together is better 
than what each of us can produce on our own.  If the only changes that 
are going to be made to my mapping work after i upload it to OSM are 
made by bots there would be no results from that that would be any 
better than what i could produce on my own because i could simply run 
the bots on my own privately mapped data.

Of course i am certainly not representative for the typical mappers.  I 
would suspect there are probably mappers that would be attracted and 
motivated by an OSM project where bots routinely 'fix' data 
inconsistencies like typos in tags, different spellings of common names 
or automatically orthogonalize building geometries.  But there are 
others who don't like this.  One motivation behind my suggestion was 
that this would allow mappers to embrace bot edits but also allows them 
to reject this and decide they only want to interact with other craft 
mappers and not with bots.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/