[OSM-talk] Call for verification (Was: Re: VANDALISM !)

[pangoSE]

Hi Shawn

"Shawn K. Quinn" <skquinn at rushpost.com> skrev: (23 augusti 2020 00:31:28 CEST)
>On 8/22/20 03:26, pangoSE wrote:
>> I meant that a verification system does exist in Wikipedia and they
>> now require references on all statements to keep up the quality of
>> the articles which is sane IMO. We have no such system.
>
>The big, huge difference between Wikipedia and OSM is that Wikipedia
>does not allow original research at all, whereas OSM thrives on the
>original research of everyone who contributes and in fact it is the
>stuff that comes from third parties that has to be vetted more closely
>for license compliance and copyright issues.
>
>I agree we could do better in the quality control department but a lot
>of things added to OSM will be added there first before any third
>parties pick them up. That makes references a bit problematic, IMO.

All edits in OSM must be verifyable on the ground if I understood this correctly: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Verifiability

Problem is to really make this easy to review without visiting the same spot we would in many cases need a good photo or perhaps multiple photos from different angles.
Unfortunately we neither encourage nor support image uploading anywhere hosted by ourselves or others (we could probably easily integrate mapillary uploading in the website and in our mobile tools. I take photos with osmtracker sometimes but cannot upload them to mapillary from inside JOSM). I'm not saying it should be a demand, but I think we would gain a lot in many changeset discussions if adding images to the chat and changesets is made possible or if images in mapillary in the area were visible and referencable on the changeset discussion page.

Alternatively we could cook our own image storage service if we want. We got the money for it now and commercial persistent object storage solutions are available from multiple providers releasing the burdon of infrastructure maintenance on our operations working group. WDYT?

This and my proposal to mark features as verified at this point in time could potentially make it much easier to judge the overall quality of our data and map.

We would still be lacking a REAL granular referencing system where every statement (tag) is references individually with a date, author and optionally a photo. That would be really awesome, but it would require additions to the main database model and ruby website to support (this is perhaps a perfect GSoC project). Being able to browse to a specific tag on an object and discuss that would be a crucial addition to the website because now we are forced to comment on the changeset (or sending pms) and I think its really cumbersome to manually reference which one of the sometimes hundreds of objects I'm talking about. 

Andy Allen (he runs  http://www.thunderforest.com/ which has a nice vector map service by the way on a free limited tier) a former member of the operations working group and current co-maintainer of the rails website posted this a year ago: 
https://gravitystorm.github.io/osmf-infra-plans/ and this july the OSMF and the operations working group announced hiring of a Senior Site Reliability Engineer: https://mobile.twitter.com/OSM_Tech/status/1287395222847139846

This seems like a good move. We would benefit a lot from being able to easily load balance and adjust VMs on our own or someone elses openstack infrastructure where we can easily provision new servers for development or testing when needed instead of having dedicated physical hardware servers that causes availability issues if they break because of single point of failures.

See also https://operations.osmfoundation.org/ 

BTW osm-fr already made this move and is mostly running VMs now and has moved some of their VMs (heavy tile rendering) into the OVH cloud to manage their hardware more efficiently. See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/FR:Serveurs_OpenStreetMap_France

Cheers
PangoSE