[OSM-talk] Sudden influx of bad HOTosm edits in West Bank

john whelan jwhelan0112 at gmail.com
Tue Oct 31 16:00:19 UTC 2017


I don't think that Andy's suggestions will work very well in practice.

The reason is that a maperthon is often organised by someone such as a
teacher who is looked on as an authority figure so their instructions will
carry more weight with the new mappers and the mappers themselves often
take the view that you don't need to read instruction books before use.

I worked with half a dozen maperthon mappers from a US university once.
The person leading the maperthon had optimistic ideas on how much mapping a
new mapper could do or how much would need explaining.  I think I could
have done the mapping they accomplished in a third of the time it took me
to handhold them through the process.  They were what I term disposable
mappers.  They did their project and as far as I know never mapped again.

Often they have no knowledge of OpenStreetMap or their local area.  To them
it's just helping the Red Cross or whatever.  They have no concept of the
economic value of the map.  Nor of the idea that anyone else than the Red
Cross or whomever they are thinking of at the time will want to use it.
They probably have no idea how to respond to a changeset comment or even
what a changeset is.

I'm not sure if anyone has done a study on the economic impact of
OpenStreetMap but I might be interesting to see.

We know that some businesses use OSM to illustrate their location.  I
understand in Bangladesh one of Uber's competitors is paying people to map
in OSM so their drivers know where to go.

Blake mentioned the validation process in HOT.  I spend a fair chunk of
time validating.  It works best with one validator on a project.  You get
to know the mappers and giving them feedback helps motivate them.

Task Manager 3 is supposed to have some improvements over TM2 for
validators.  It looks promising but there are a number of issues that need
sorting out.

The process itself currently means someone with no experience can validate
others work. Fine except you end up with lots of green tiles but you don't
know if you can trust the mapping or the validation.

My personal view is HOT works best where there is little prior mapping and
the impact of adding fifty untagged ways is low.  In an area such as the
West Bank which is policitally sensitive precautions should have been taken
to ensure an experienced validation team was on hand that could verify the
mapping shortly after it was done. The better organised project managers do
have a validation teams for their projects.

HOT project managers are often enthusiastic but sometimes have little idea
of what works best or even how to map.  HOT is working hard to improve
this.  Typically they set a project up then move on.  One or two keep an
eye on their projects but my feeling is that is not the general rule.  They
often have no idea who is organising maperthons using their project.

Instead of map everything in the tile it more common these days to ask for
just buildings or just roads.  This recognises that its simpler to train
new mappers on one or two things than bring them up to speed quickly on
everything.

OSM does retain some of the HOT mappers so not all the work is lost.

As you can tell I'm not one of the world's enthusiastic optimists but it is
getting better slowly and one day my phone will stop correcting my words.

Cheerio John

On 31 Oct 2017 11:00 am, "Andy Townsend" <ajt1047 at gmail.com> wrote:

> For info, here's an example changeset discussion comment I've just
> written.  Where new mappers are not quite getting the hang of things it'd
> be great if before someone leaps to the mailing list to either complain
> abot or defend HOT and HOT mappers they could offer them advice and help
> about how to get better:
>
>
> "Hello and welcome to OpenStreetMap!
> Looking at some of the changes here such as $example I think you may be
> "overinterpreting" the imagery somewhat.
> If you look at the different imagery choices available you can get a
> feeling for the scale quite well, and its clear that none or almost none of
> the buildings that you've added here actually are buildings (that's clear
> with both Bing and your custom imagery - in fact your custom imagery, if
> later, suggests that buildings shown on Bing have been removed).
> Assuming you're not in the West Bank at the moment, what I'd suggest is
> that you try mapping things more locally to you first - often it's useful
> to look at the imagery of a place you know well to see how certain features
> look from the air.  It can be difficult to tell roads from e.g. riverbeds
> if you're not careful.
> If you're in $country (guessing, based on your editor locale of $locale
> above) then there are lots of local groups both HOT-based and non-HOT based
> where you can discuss mapping; there are also mailing lists and other
> forums - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact has lots of details.
> Best Regards,
> Andy"
>
> It'd also be great to refer mappers to other learning resources like the
> wiki beginners' guide or learnosm, but that can be a bit difficult since
> it's difficult to know what they've seen so far
>
> Regards,
> Andy
>
>
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