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

[Andy Townsend]

On 31/10/2017 16:00, john whelan wrote:
>
> Often they have no knowledge of OpenStreetMap or their local area.  To 
> them it's just helping the Red Cross or whatever.

Everybody (unless they're "serving life without parole") has knowledge 
of _some_ local area.  If people really don't know what they're doing in 
OSM, maybe they could better help the Red Cross in some other way?

More generally, it seems to be quite cruel to take someone with no 
knowledge of the climate, landscape and architecture a foreign country 
and with little knowledge of geography and (in the most recent case) map 
scales, and expect them to make sensible additions to OSM.  It's not 
their fault that their contributions are net negative; they've been set 
a near-impossible task.  It's even worse if they're students and they're 
actually going to be assessed on the results.

Someone's creating these tasks and someone (not necessarily the same 
person) is assigning them to brand new mappers.  It seems a real shame 
that they're not bothering to look at what has worked in the past and 
learning from that, not asking for feedback or assistance as they go on 
and not helping HOT volunteers do the thing that they're trying to help 
with - the technical solutions (task manager etc.) are in place but the 
human bit's missing.

Best Regards,
Andy