Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Nick Hocking]

I haven't read the whole thread, so apologies if I'm repeating something.

How about we introduce into editors (that advanced users use) a default
behaviour that at above a certain zoom level, all features that have been
edited in the last 24 hours are somehow colourised. Features edited between
1 and two days a different colour, and up to seven days ago, further
different colours.   One keystroke could remove all this colourisation.

This would not address deletion Vandalism but would attract the attention
of advanced mappers to suspiccious edits.
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Rory McCann]

On 20.03.2017 18:23, Mikel Maron wrote:

For example (this may have been mentioned before on the thread) .. the
OSM US community has set up a Slack channel with notifications of every
new user editing. We monitor this channel, give a quick look at edits,
and send welcome emails. That said, it's an overwhelming number of new
users, and improvements which helped the community both focus on
problematic new edits and scale welcomes would help a lot.


Just to chime in with another data point. In Ireland we have an IRC bot 
that does similar for our #osm-ie channel. It notifies on every new 
editing. We can also add users to a watch list, so it'll notify when 
those users edit. It also says when notes are created.


It's quite helpful to keep track of things, but it can be easy to miss 
things.


Rory

___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Michał Brzozowski]

Here are two accounts which have spam (SEO) user description page and
have vandalized the map:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Morland
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Mlafagos
Just for a reference for another vandal motivation (doubly stupid,
first - rel=nofollow being used on osm.org and second - they didn't
have to make any edits)

Michał

___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Andy Townsend]

Just to add one more comment to what has been a very useful thread 
discussing the options available:


At no time did anyone see fit to actually try and get in touch with the 
user who made these edits explaining what OSM is and trying to win them 
over from "mapping for Pokemon" to mapping things that actually exist.


Surely that's got to be worth a try, rather than proposing (as some have 
here) some sort of "technical solution"?  A quick scan of 
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions suggests that there are 
quite a lot of people doing exactly that - lots of "Bonjour bienvenue 
sur OpenStreetMap" there.  I know that it's frustrating writing that 
over and over again, but there have certainly been examples on talk-us 
and the reddit threads of people who have "crossed over".


Best Regards,

Andy


___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Mikel Maron]

Hi 
Frederik wrote
> Hence, the #1 strategy against "there's no local community that helps newbies 
>and reports vandals" for me is always: Attract a local community. Put more 
>cynically: A map without a local community is not able to survive, and has 
>never been, and it was perhaps a mistake to put it there in the first place.
It's an interesting question -- what is the ideal local community, what is the 
way of building one, and what is the role of the global OSM community in this? 
I don't think we have the answer to this, nor is there one answer -- what has 
worked in Germany, or even particular parts of Germany, is not going to work 
everywhere. I doubt that participation of the global community has dampened the 
growth of local communities, quite the contrary in my experience. 
Anyway, I feel this thread has wandered and I'd love to focus on what I take is 
Manohar's intent in writing this email...> Building better support systems to 
respond to bad edits could help more experienced mappers focus on community 
building activities. Even well developed local communities could simply use 
better support systems to monitor and respond to issues on intentional 
vandalism and unintentional errors. What do those systems look like? How can we 
improve the osm website, other services in the OSM ecosystem, documentation?
For example (this may have been mentioned before on the thread) .. the OSM US 
community has set up a Slack channel with notifications of every new user 
editing. We monitor this channel, give a quick look at edits, and send welcome 
emails. That said, it's an overwhelming number of new users, and improvements 
which helped the community both focus on problematic new edits and scale 
welcomes would help a lot.
I work with Manohar at Mapbox, so do have some rough ideas here from our 
internal QA work. But really wanted to learn what else is used currently, and 
what we'd all like to do together. Curious to hear if there's some 
commonalities among Tomas's tools for Lithuania, Joost's approaches, Michael's 
osm-analytical-tracker. Maybe we could also schedule a time to chat together on 
IRC and brainstorm approaches.
-Mikel
* Mikel Maron * +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron 

On Thursday, March 16, 2017 2:07 PM, Frederik Ramm  
wrote:
 

 Hi,

  I find it a bit unfortunate that you have chosen to use "vandalism"
in the subject, even though you later write

On 16.03.2017 14:47, Manohar Erikipati wrote:
> ... protect the map against common mistakes and intentional attacks. 

I think that "common mistakes" (mostly, beginner's mistakes) and
intentional attacks are two very different things that need very
different strategies.

And in vandalism, I would also distinguish between teenage doodles
("penis! ha ha ha!"), and serious concerted efforts to harm OSM. The
latter we haven't seen yet, but need to be prepared to face in the future.

> Much of the world lacks an active mapping community

It is my personal belief that OSM can never work without an active local
mapping community. That's one reason why I am always skeptical about
armchair mapping or massive imports (or even using machine learning to
generate data). These techniques help to fill the map with nice colours
but they don't give us what OSM thrives on - local mappers.

Hence, the #1 strategy against "there's no local community that helps
newbies and reports vandals" for me is always: Attract a local
community. Put more cynically: A map without a local community is not
able to survive, and has never been, and it was perhaps a mistake to put
it there in the first place.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frede...@remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"

___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk


   ___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Michael Andersen]

Since it was first announced in october 2015, I have been watching the demo 
instance of https://github.com/MichaelVL/osm-analytic-tracker (developed by a 
fellow dane) almost daily and have found it immensely useful for keeping track 
of the activity in all of Denmark (the country north of Germany).
Until this year I have been practically singlehandedly guarding my entire 
country, welcoming new users and catching and correcting all kinds of 
mistakes, sometimes within as little as 5 minutes and actually been pretty 
succesfull at it.
This year a few other contributors have started watching the instance too, but 
unfortunately none of them still has the necessary experience and confidence 
for really helping out. I hope they eventually will.
I listed the link to the instance on my profile page: 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Hjart , so that anyone wondering how I 
discovered their edits so fast, has a chance of finding out.
Of course this tool requires running a dedicated server, but if you want an 
efficient tool for patrolling a country/state sized area, this is it.

On søndag den 19. marts 2017 08.39.27 CET Paul Johnson wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 2:02 PM, Yves  wrote:
> > Interesting, I didn't know such patrolling took place at a country scale
> > in OSM. Have you revert/re-map stats?
> > 
> > However with your point 1)you have an idea.
> > How about a service rendering the area affected by an edit before
> > 'commit'?
> > This preview could be the place for an additional warning about the the
> > live DB.
> 
> I'd be open to patrolling a wider area than (most) of my metro area (such
> as the entire state), but it seems WHODIDIT's about the only tool that
> isn't completely hamfisted that I'm aware of, and it's bbox limit isn't
> quite big enough to fit what most here would consider the entire metro,
> much less what TV and radio consder the entire metro (TV and radio stations
> typically also consider several southeastern Kansas and northwestern
> Arkansas counties as part of "metro Tulsa").




___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Oleksiy Muzalyev]

On 17.03.17 20:22, Jakob Mühldorfer wrote:


Google tried to have restrictions on new editors
The map got vandalised anyways and they shut down public editing
So basically what others said, not in favour of any kind of restrictions.

I also think it is impossible to stop vandalism by a single technical 
solution, rather it would be a running battle for years to come. Still 
we are to watch it carefully and to try to understand in each case the 
motivation of a vandal, what target was selected and why, what was the 
pattern of an occurrence, from what region it was initiated, when it was 
committed. And on the basis of this understanding to use tools to 
automate the response. Human cunning can be countered only by human 
cleverness.


___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[joost schouppe]

>
>
> Now here what has to be done is an appropriate testing mechanism.
> There are some functionality already done (like the one in Belgium),
> but the problem is that everybody sees ALL last changes, there is no
> way to SHARE the work of checking and you never know if somebody has
> already checked the changeset.
>
>
Well yes, that is possible. There are two approaches: create a database of
suspicious and/or reviewed changesets. Or: document your review process
using structured Changeset Discussions, so they are available for your tool
(and possibly others)

Can I plug the #pleasereview idea again too? People should really be
encouraged to mark their changeset as "I'm not entirely sure of what I'm
doing". That way, more timid people will be more tempted to try something
new. It really is quite easy to implement, as adding it to the Changeset
comment would feed any of several existing tools. See my blog post from
some time back:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/joost%20schouppe/diary/39876
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Paul Johnson]

On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 2:02 PM, Yves  wrote:

> Interesting, I didn't know such patrolling took place at a country scale
> in OSM. Have you revert/re-map stats?
>
> However with your point 1)you have an idea.
> How about a service rendering the area affected by an edit before 'commit'?
> This preview could be the place for an additional warning about the the
> live DB.
>

I'd be open to patrolling a wider area than (most) of my metro area (such
as the entire state), but it seems WHODIDIT's about the only tool that
isn't completely hamfisted that I'm aware of, and it's bbox limit isn't
quite big enough to fit what most here would consider the entire metro,
much less what TV and radio consder the entire metro (TV and radio stations
typically also consider several southeastern Kansas and northwestern
Arkansas counties as part of "metro Tulsa").
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Paul Johnson]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 2:27 PM, Nicolás Alvarez 
wrote:

> 2017-03-16 16:00 GMT-03:00 Mike N :
> > On 3/16/2017 2:04 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> >>
> >> And in vandalism, I would also distinguish between teenage doodles
> >> ("penis! ha ha ha!"), and serious concerted efforts to harm OSM.
> >
> >
> >   Then there's the serious and real ha ha ha
> > http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/41.84196/-89.48580
>
> Not so real; the actual church shape is quite different. Bing's
> imagery is way too old, but if you compare with USGS Large Scale
> Imagery (or with the Google photo in the article you linked), you can
> see that someone simply freehand-drew a penis-shaped building there.
>

To be fair, they could have been using id or Potlatch.  I tend to find it's
lack of ability to zoom in without changing the background zoom level and
the lack of mode locking and alignment selectivity JOSM has makes it very
difficult to come up with something that doesn't look like it wasn't drawn
by an overcaffeinated macaque suffering alcohol DTs.
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Paul Johnson]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Michael Reichert  wrote:

> I can second that. I did Pokémon cleaning in Germany. The majority of
> them doesn't edit OSM a second time.
>

In defense of PoGo for a moment...

I've actually been fairly impressed with this in my region.  We've had a
few new casual mappers come in from PoGo join in with largely positive
results (and refreshing to get some additional perspective).

To date, we have had one user who was referred to the DWG and blocked by
SimonPoole two months ago, expiring when they next log in (they have not
yet logged in).
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Paul Johnson]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 12:44 PM, Dave F 
wrote:

>
> On 16/03/2017 17:13, James wrote:
>
>> People can't even be bothered to review osmcha, you think people will
>> want to approve changesets?
>>
>>
> Could that be because it's not the very user friendly site? The filter
> options are overly complicated & doesn't even save them!
>

Not to mention, WHODIDIT 
does exactly the same thing, but in an RSS feed, based on options you set
once...
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Tomas Straupis]

> Is your process documented anywhere and is the code available?

  There is a "help" page, but it is in Lithuanian... Maybe google
translate can help:
  http://patrulis.openmap.lt/pagalba.html

  Code (php+postgresql) is very basic and dirty (i'm not a web
developer) and I didn't have time to put it on github yet (planning to
do that for a year or so...). But code is also full of Lithuanian
comments and names...

  If somebody wants to have a look at it - I can share/send the code
and give any information required in English.

P.S. This patrolling stuff is integrated with QA tools (fetching a
list of errors from keepright, osmose as well as doing local error
checking) and data synchronisation tools. So "all in one" solution.
You get a list of unapproved changes, a list of not yet fixed errors
and a status of synchronisation of different items.

-- 
Tomas

___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Clifford Snow]

On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 8:50 AM, Tomas Straupis 
wrote:

>
> What we are doing in Lithuania for the last 5 years or so is we have a
> patrolling mechanism similar to wikipedia. That is all changesets in
> the region (in our case in Lithuania) are filtered out and placed into
> "check list". If the editor is known good mapper - his/her edits are
> "approved" automatically. Otherwise somebody with a status of "known"
> mapper should approve it. But when the changeset is approved - it does
> not show up for other "approvers". This way we avoid double work. So
> in practice this allows us to review only "suspicious" changes and in
> 5 year of experience this worked out perfectly - all bad/suspicious
> changes have been noticed in a matter of hours! (for example all
> suspicious crap.me edits can be reverted promptly)
>

Is your process documented anywhere and is the code available? This sounds
like a reasonable solution to the problem. I especially like that people
aren't double checking new users.  It sounds like an approach much like
Martijn Van Exel's Maproulette but without the random picking of the user.

Clifford

-- 
@osm_seattle
osm_seattle.snowandsnow.us
OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Tomas Straupis]

> Interesting, I didn't know such patrolling took place at a country scale in
> OSM. Have you revert/re-map stats?

  No, such stats are not collected. And it would be hard to do that,
because it is not yes/no. Sometimes it's just a minor problem,
sometimes it is something much worse. Until appearance of infamous new
"editor" full reverts were very rare. It was mostly
fixing/informing/teaching.

> However with your point 1)you have an idea.
> How about a service rendering the area affected by an edit before 'commit'?
> This preview could be the place for an additional warning about the the live
> DB.

  Point 1) (change->test->commit) was about doing testing/approving
BEFORE the change gets to "final" database, before it is visible to
others/maps etc. So this is (in my opinion) not acceptable for open
project. Option 1 is only used in 2nd level - derivative
databases/subsets.

-- 
Tomas

___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Jakob Mühldorfer]

Google tried to have restrictions on new editors
The map got vandalised anyways and they shut down public editing
So basically what others said, not in favour of any kind of restrictions.


Am 16.03.2017 um 14:47 schrieb Manohar Erikipati:

Hi all,

Last saturday, Central park in New York City was vandalized by a new OSM user 
`Meowthreetimes` in all the map edits:

- 46756622 introduced a fictional lake inside Central 
parkhttps://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/46756622
- 46756461 renamed Central park 
inhttps://www.openstreetmap.org/way/427818536/history
- 46756506 introduced a fictional lake near Fort worth 
Dallashttp://www.openstreetmap.org/way/479837732/history

It took 2 days for the edits to be noticed and reverted on one of the most 
popular locations in the world.

This was possibly preventable with a more active mapping community, but a 
previous incident [1] highlights how simple cases like dragged ways can stay 
around the map for months under the eyes of local mappers. The current strategy 
of leaving changeset comments to users to prevent bad edits does not scale, 
especially if the mappers do not read messages like Maps.me editors [2], or if 
there are no expert mappers in the area who are knowledgeable in reporting and 
reverting changes.

Thinking out loud on how we could better improve the current process to act on 
bad edits:

- DWG currently acts promptly on incidents reported via email, but we need a 
more accessible mechanism that allows new users to report such incidents 
directly from the website or editors. The email details and existence of DWG, 
is only available currently in the wiki [3]
- Auto-blocking known vandals to prevent repeated attacks [4]
- An organised repository to report and learn from previous attacks. There 
seems to have been an effort to do this many years ago on the wiki [5]
- More visibility, awareness of QA tools and history tab on the OSM homepage. 
Most of the really powerful QA tools like osmhv and osmose are only known to 
advanced users.

It would be great to hear more approaches that could protect the map against 
common mistakes and intentional attacks. Much of the world lacks an active 
mapping community, so it is up to a small set of power mappers to catch and 
revert most of the bad edits [6]. Building better support systems to respond to 
bad edits could help more experienced mappers focus on community building 
activities.


[1]https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/PlaneMad/diary/40491
[2]https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/4188
[3]https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vandalism
[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoblock
[5]http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_Vandalism_Changesets
[6]http://osmcha.mapbox.com/?usernames=woodpeck_repair%2C+zool%2C+SomeoneElse_Revert%2C+mavl%2C+pnorman_mechanical%2C+_sev%2C+OSMF+Data+Working+Group%2C+Peda%2C+FTA_dwg%2C+Deanna+Earley%2C+Firefishy_repair%2C+drolbr%2C+emacsen_dwg%2C+sly_suspect=False_whitelisted=All=False




Best,

Manohar Erikipati

osm : manoharuss


___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk


___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Yves]

Interesting, I didn't know such patrolling took place at a country scale in 
OSM. Have you revert/re-map stats? 

However with your point 1)you have an idea. 
How about a service rendering the area affected by an edit before 'commit'?
This preview could be the place for an additional warning about the the live 
DB. 
Yves 

Le 17 mars 2017 16:50:53 GMT+01:00, Tomas Straupis  a 
écrit :
>Let's get on the higher level first.
>There are two ways of doing it from the process perspective:
>
>1) EDIT->TEST->COMMIT
>2) EDIT->COMMIT->TEST
>
>The first one gives higher quality but also discourages edits and
>maybe even prohibits edits in areas with no/few "checkers".
>
>So obviously the way to go for OSM is option 2.
>
>Now here what has to be done is an appropriate testing mechanism.
>There are some functionality already done (like the one in Belgium),
>but the problem is that everybody sees ALL last changes, there is no
>way to SHARE the work of checking and you never know if somebody has
>already checked the changeset.
>
>What we are doing in Lithuania for the last 5 years or so is we have a
>patrolling mechanism similar to wikipedia. That is all changesets in
>the region (in our case in Lithuania) are filtered out and placed into
>"check list". If the editor is known good mapper - his/her edits are
>"approved" automatically. Otherwise somebody with a status of "known"
>mapper should approve it. But when the changeset is approved - it does
>not show up for other "approvers". This way we avoid double work. So
>in practice this allows us to review only "suspicious" changes and in
>5 year of experience this worked out perfectly - all bad/suspicious
>changes have been noticed in a matter of hours! (for example all
>suspicious crap.me edits can be reverted promptly)
>
>So my suggestion is to add some global "patrolling" mechanism with
>division to regions (maybe by countries, maybe by country regions for
>large countries). So if there are people interested in some region,
>they will review the changesets, if there is nobody interested -
>nobody will review, but changes will be in database anyway - so no
>preventing of edits.
>
>P.S. Second step would be more automated checks but that is a separate
>topic and should only go after this first one is solved/implemented.
>
>-- 
>Tomas
>
>___
>talk mailing list
>talk@openstreetmap.org
>https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Tomas Straupis]

Let's get on the higher level first.
There are two ways of doing it from the process perspective:

1) EDIT->TEST->COMMIT
2) EDIT->COMMIT->TEST

The first one gives higher quality but also discourages edits and
maybe even prohibits edits in areas with no/few "checkers".

So obviously the way to go for OSM is option 2.

Now here what has to be done is an appropriate testing mechanism.
There are some functionality already done (like the one in Belgium),
but the problem is that everybody sees ALL last changes, there is no
way to SHARE the work of checking and you never know if somebody has
already checked the changeset.

What we are doing in Lithuania for the last 5 years or so is we have a
patrolling mechanism similar to wikipedia. That is all changesets in
the region (in our case in Lithuania) are filtered out and placed into
"check list". If the editor is known good mapper - his/her edits are
"approved" automatically. Otherwise somebody with a status of "known"
mapper should approve it. But when the changeset is approved - it does
not show up for other "approvers". This way we avoid double work. So
in practice this allows us to review only "suspicious" changes and in
5 year of experience this worked out perfectly - all bad/suspicious
changes have been noticed in a matter of hours! (for example all
suspicious crap.me edits can be reverted promptly)

So my suggestion is to add some global "patrolling" mechanism with
division to regions (maybe by countries, maybe by country regions for
large countries). So if there are people interested in some region,
they will review the changesets, if there is nobody interested -
nobody will review, but changes will be in database anyway - so no
preventing of edits.

P.S. Second step would be more automated checks but that is a separate
topic and should only go after this first one is solved/implemented.

-- 
Tomas

___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Clifford Snow]

On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 7:03 AM, Rory McCann  wrote:

> But the advantage is that we get a free, global map. IMO new users being
> able to see their changes on the map is very powerful, and makes them
> more likely to continue to edit. I don't think we would have the map we
> have today if people needed to be approved by those in power already. I
> don't like the idea of a cabal having the ability to approve/deny
> edits.
>

+1


-- 
@osm_seattle
osm_seattle.snowandsnow.us
OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Rory McCann]

It's a shame that this happened, ideally it shouldn't and it should be
be fixed faster. But I don't think we should give up the "wiki" aspect. 
Everyone, even new users, should be able to edit the "live" database. 
Which yes, will have disadvantages.


But the advantage is that we get a free, global map. IMO new users being
able to see their changes on the map is very powerful, and makes them
more likely to continue to edit. I don't think we would have the map we
have today if people needed to be approved by those in power already. I
don't like the idea of a cabal having the ability to approve/deny
edits.

On 16.03.2017 14:47, Manohar Erikipati wrote:

Hi all,

Last saturday, Central park in New York City was vandalized by a new OSM user 
`Meowthreetimes` in all the map edits:

- 46756622 introduced a fictional lake inside Central park 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/46756622
- 46756461 renamed Central park in 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/427818536/history
- 46756506 introduced a fictional lake near Fort worth Dallas 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/479837732/history

It took 2 days for the edits to be noticed and reverted on one of the most 
popular locations in the world.

This was possibly preventable with a more active mapping community, but a 
previous incident [1] highlights how simple cases like dragged ways can stay 
around the map for months under the eyes of local mappers. The current strategy 
of leaving changeset comments to users to prevent bad edits does not scale, 
especially if the mappers do not read messages like Maps.me editors [2], or if 
there are no expert mappers in the area who are knowledgeable in reporting and 
reverting changes.

Thinking out loud on how we could better improve the current process to act on 
bad edits:

- DWG currently acts promptly on incidents reported via email, but we need a 
more accessible mechanism that allows new users to report such incidents 
directly from the website or editors. The email details and existence of DWG, 
is only available currently in the wiki [3]
- Auto-blocking known vandals to prevent repeated attacks [4]
- An organised repository to report and learn from previous attacks. There 
seems to have been an effort to do this many years ago on the wiki [5]
- More visibility, awareness of QA tools and history tab on the OSM homepage. 
Most of the really powerful QA tools like osmhv and osmose are only known to 
advanced users.

It would be great to hear more approaches that could protect the map against 
common mistakes and intentional attacks. Much of the world lacks an active 
mapping community, so it is up to a small set of power mappers to catch and 
revert most of the bad edits [6]. Building better support systems to respond to 
bad edits could help more experienced mappers focus on community building 
activities.


[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/PlaneMad/diary/40491
[2] https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/4188
[3] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vandalism
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoblock
[5] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_Vandalism_Changesets
[6] 
http://osmcha.mapbox.com/?usernames=woodpeck_repair%2C+zool%2C+SomeoneElse_Revert%2C+mavl%2C+pnorman_mechanical%2C+_sev%2C+OSMF+Data+Working+Group%2C+Peda%2C+FTA_dwg%2C+Deanna+Earley%2C+Firefishy_repair%2C+drolbr%2C+emacsen_dwg%2C+sly_suspect=False_whitelisted=All=False




Best,

Manohar Erikipati

osm : manoharuss



___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk




___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2017-03-16 20:00 GMT+01:00 Mike N :

>   Then there's the serious and real ha ha ha
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/41.84196/-89.48580
>
> http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2013/10/31/from-the-sky-dixon-ch
> urch-looks-like-a-penis/
>


likely intentional, the "view from the sky" is the same as that of the
architect drawing a floor plan ;-)

Cheers,
Martin
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2017-03-16 16:01 GMT+01:00 James :

> The more restrictions you put, the smarter people will get (just look at
> CAPTCHA, for bots, people would upload images of captchas to a service
> which real people would solve and return the answer to the bots)



+1, recently there was a proof of concept of someone fooling COMPANY's
captchas with COMPANY's own image recognition tool ;-)

Cheers,
Martin
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Nicolás Alvarez]

2017-03-16 16:00 GMT-03:00 Mike N :
> On 3/16/2017 2:04 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>>
>> And in vandalism, I would also distinguish between teenage doodles
>> ("penis! ha ha ha!"), and serious concerted efforts to harm OSM.
>
>
>   Then there's the serious and real ha ha ha
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/41.84196/-89.48580

Not so real; the actual church shape is quite different. Bing's
imagery is way too old, but if you compare with USGS Large Scale
Imagery (or with the Google photo in the article you linked), you can
see that someone simply freehand-drew a penis-shaped building there.

-- 
Nicolás

___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Mike N]

On 3/16/2017 2:04 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:

And in vandalism, I would also distinguish between teenage doodles
("penis! ha ha ha!"), and serious concerted efforts to harm OSM.


  Then there's the serious and real ha ha ha 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/41.84196/-89.48580


http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2013/10/31/from-the-sky-dixon-church-looks-like-a-penis/


___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

   I find it a bit unfortunate that you have chosen to use "vandalism"
in the subject, even though you later write

On 16.03.2017 14:47, Manohar Erikipati wrote:
> ... protect the map against common mistakes and intentional attacks. 

I think that "common mistakes" (mostly, beginner's mistakes) and
intentional attacks are two very different things that need very
different strategies.

And in vandalism, I would also distinguish between teenage doodles
("penis! ha ha ha!"), and serious concerted efforts to harm OSM. The
latter we haven't seen yet, but need to be prepared to face in the future.

> Much of the world lacks an active mapping community

It is my personal belief that OSM can never work without an active local
mapping community. That's one reason why I am always skeptical about
armchair mapping or massive imports (or even using machine learning to
generate data). These techniques help to fill the map with nice colours
but they don't give us what OSM thrives on - local mappers.

Hence, the #1 strategy against "there's no local community that helps
newbies and reports vandals" for me is always: Attract a local
community. Put more cynically: A map without a local community is not
able to survive, and has never been, and it was perhaps a mistake to put
it there in the first place.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frede...@remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"

___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Michael Reichert]

Hi Manohar,

Am 2017-03-16 um 14:47 schrieb Manohar Erikipati:
> - DWG currently acts promptly on incidents reported via email, but we
> need a more accessible mechanism that allows new users to report such
> incidents directly from the website or editors. The email details and
> existence of DWG, is only available currently in the wiki [3]

There was a GSoC project about a "report" button two years ago, wasn't it?

> - Auto-blocking known vandals to prevent repeated attacks [4]

No! We are not the German Wikipedia. Users should only be blocked after
two humans verified that a user block is reasonable. Don't do
overblocking. Most of the overblocked users won't try to lift their block.

> - More visibility, awareness of QA tools and history tab on the OSM
> homepage. Most of the really powerful QA tools like osmhv and osmose
> are only known to advanced users.

That's a desing problem of osm.org. The website is too much focussed on
the map. The full opposite is openstreetmap.de (only available in German
and needs some care) which highlights that OSM is a collection of
projects, not a map.

> It would be great to hear more approaches that could protect the map
> against common mistakes and intentional attacks. Much of the world
> lacks an active mapping community, so it is up to a small set of power
> mappers to catch and revert most of the bad edits [6]. Building better
> support systems to respond to bad edits could help more experienced
> mappers focus on community building activities.
> 
> 
> [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/PlaneMad/diary/40491
> [2] https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/4188
> [3] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vandalism
> [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoblock
> [5] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_Vandalism_Changesets
> [6] 
> http://osmcha.mapbox.com/?usernames=woodpeck_repair%2C+zool%2C+SomeoneElse_Revert%2C+mavl%2C+pnorman_mechanical%2C+_sev%2C+OSMF+Data+Working+Group%2C+Peda%2C+FTA_dwg%2C+Deanna+Earley%2C+Firefishy_repair%2C+drolbr%2C+emacsen_dwg%2C+sly_suspect=False_whitelisted=All=False

Your list contains only DWG members. There is a handful of mappers who
also clean up bad edits and work as an unorganized protection shield of
DWG, i.e. they comment and clean and only contact the DWG if they need a
user block. Some of them use dedicated revert accounts:

DD1GJ,Nakaner-repair,highflyer74,BeKri,tux67

Btw, using a revert account like I do it, is a good idea. It keeps your
statistics clean.

Best regards

Michael


-- 
Per E-Mail kommuniziere ich bevorzugt GPG-verschlüsselt. (Mailinglisten
ausgenommen)
I prefer GPG encryption of emails. (does not apply on mailing lists)




signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Michael Reichert]

Hi,

Am 2017-03-16 um 15:48 schrieb Clifford Snow:
> Manohar,
> My experience is most of these edits can be cleaned up easily with simple
> edits. Some need full reverting, which can be done using JOSM, while others
> need careful pruning of the bad but leaving the good. I've fixed numerous
> pokemon edits in Washington State. I've only had to go to DWG 2or 3 time. I
> don't think we need to involve DWG in every case.
>
> I've send changeset comments and messages. Other than one belligerent
> individual who promised to report me if I kept reverting his phony edits,
> I've never heard back from any of them. There have been a number of example
> of appropriate changeset comments posted on talk and talk-us that let the
> mapper know the behavior isn't appreciated but also encourages them to
> become an active contributor. I suspect pokemon players could become
> prolific mappers.

I can second that. I did Pokémon cleaning in Germany. The majority of
them doesn't edit OSM a second time. Some of the do, therefore I add all
users whose edits I reverted to my RSS feed reader for a few weeks to
check if future edits are ok. I had three cases when those users
continued mapping. Only one of them really needed a 0-hour block to read
his changeset comments.

> A tool that flags new parks, don't just look for named parks, but all parks
> - some of the players haven't gotten the word that it's only named parks,
> and new water features would be useful. Right now Ian Dees has a bot
> running on slack [1] and IRC[2] that picks up new users from the changeset
> feed. Sure it would be nice of someone could develop a similar bot to watch
> for new users adding pokemon features. But until we have that tool we
> really need to encourage more people to watch edits in their area.

A tool which looks for the editing patterns currently used by Pokémon
mappers would be very good. What about an additional filter for OSMCHA?
The filter should be adapted if the editing pattern changes, i.e. some
mappers should look what Pokémon player are currently discussing about
on the social media (i.e. do spying).

> [1] https://osmus.slack.com/messages/new-mappers
> [2]  irc://irc.oftc.net #osm-bot

You can also use http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosm?c=Germany to
look for new mappers. If you review changesets by newbies, please write
a changeset comment that you reverted the edits if you did it. You
should be honest towards the user whose edits you reverted and other
reviewers are happy if they don't have to review a changeset which has
already been reverted.

Best regards

Michael

-- 
Per E-Mail kommuniziere ich bevorzugt GPG-verschlüsselt. (Mailinglisten
ausgenommen)
I prefer GPG encryption of emails. (does not apply on mailing lists)




signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 16.03.2017 15:46, Bas Couwenberg wrote:
> OSM lacks a good staging area where new contributors can experiment and 
> learn without breaking the production data.

I had offered the technical infrastructure for this

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/2016-November/029557.html

but not had any takers willing to do the work until now.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frede...@remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"

___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Dave F]

On 16/03/2017 17:13, James wrote:
People can't even be bothered to review osmcha, you think people will 
want to approve changesets?




Could that be because it's not the very user friendly site? The filter 
options are overly complicated & doesn't even save them!


DaveF

---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus


___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

On 03/16/2017 06:13 PM, James wrote:
> People can't even be bothered to review osmcha, you think people will want
> to approve changesets?

Eventually, yes. It will become part of a responsible and thriving local
community. Debian managed to transition from a free-for-all (just
mailing the project leader) to a new-maintainer process and sponsors in
teams to assist new contributors.

Kind Regards,

Bas

-- 
 GPG Key ID: 4096R/6750F10AE88D4AF1
Fingerprint: 8182 DE41 7056 408D 6146  50D1 6750 F10A E88D 4AF1

___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Yves]

Another approach is a middle player between the raw DB and the data consumers. 
Yves ___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[James]

People can't even be bothered to review osmcha, you think people will want
to approve changesets?

On Mar 16, 2017 1:07 PM, "Sebastiaan Couwenberg"  wrote:

> On 03/16/2017 05:30 PM, James wrote:
> > and maintainers privileges, would be determined by whom? Other
> maintainers?
>
> Yes, the local community grants that privilege.
>
> When the local community is dysfunctional there is the overriding
> authority of OSMF WGs like DWG. Like we have the Technical Commitee in
> Debian or General Resolutions (project wide votes).
>
> > Then you have whats going on on Wikipedia Fr where it's controlled by a
> > small group of close friends that refuse anything outside their norms,
> > which is bad.
>
> Wikipedia is not a model that one should choose to model, Linux
> distributions are a much better role model.
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Bas
>
> --
>  GPG Key ID: 4096R/6750F10AE88D4AF1
> Fingerprint: 8182 DE41 7056 408D 6146  50D1 6750 F10A E88D 4AF1
>
> ___
> talk mailing list
> talk@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

On 03/16/2017 05:30 PM, James wrote:
> and maintainers privileges, would be determined by whom? Other maintainers?

Yes, the local community grants that privilege.

When the local community is dysfunctional there is the overriding
authority of OSMF WGs like DWG. Like we have the Technical Commitee in
Debian or General Resolutions (project wide votes).

> Then you have whats going on on Wikipedia Fr where it's controlled by a
> small group of close friends that refuse anything outside their norms,
> which is bad.

Wikipedia is not a model that one should choose to model, Linux
distributions are a much better role model.

Kind Regards,

Bas

-- 
 GPG Key ID: 4096R/6750F10AE88D4AF1
Fingerprint: 8182 DE41 7056 408D 6146  50D1 6750 F10A E88D 4AF1

___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[James]

and maintainers privileges, would be determined by whom? Other maintainers?
Then you have whats going on on Wikipedia Fr where it's controlled by a
small group of close friends that refuse anything outside their norms,
which is bad.

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 12:17 PM, Bas Couwenberg  wrote:

> On 2017-03-16 16:01, James wrote:
>
>> Even if we had a Git pull request sort of mechanism, who would "approve"
>> edits?
>>
>
> Anyone with maintainer priviledges in the respective local community. This
> privilege is earned by proving skill.
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Bas
>
> ___
> talk mailing list
> talk@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>



-- 
外に遊びに行こう！
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Bas Couwenberg]

On 2017-03-16 16:01, James wrote:
Even if we had a Git pull request sort of mechanism, who would 
"approve"

edits?


Anyone with maintainer priviledges in the respective local community. 
This privilege is earned by proving skill.


Kind Regards,

Bas

___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[joost schouppe]

2017-03-16 16:15 GMT+01:00 Clifford Snow :

>
> On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 8:03 AM, Jean-Marc Liotier  wrote:
>
>> Users who have invested into a number of Openstreetmap contributions
>> seldom spend their karma into vandalism, so my experience is that
>> patrolling contributions by new users catches most deliberate mayhem.
>>
>
> +1
>
>
Exactly! Which is why it is so important to review every first changesets
of every new contributor. We have a user in Belgium doing that, and adding
some info to https://welcome.osm.be/ , so we can follow up with more people.


-- 
Joost Schouppe
OpenStreetMap  |
Twitter  | LinkedIn
 | Meetup

___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Clifford Snow]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 8:03 AM, Jean-Marc Liotier  wrote:

> Users who have invested into a number of Openstreetmap contributions
> seldom spend their karma into vandalism, so my experience is that
> patrolling contributions by new users catches most deliberate mayhem.
>

+1


-- 
@osm_seattle
osm_seattle.snowandsnow.us
OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Jean-Marc Liotier]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2017 07:48:10 -0700
Clifford Snow  wrote:
>
> a bot running on slack and IRC that picks up new users from the
> changeset feed. Sure it would be nice of someone could develop
> a similar bot to watch for new users

Use the excellent
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosmcreatefeed.php and feed the RSS
into whatever you use for notifying.

Users who have invested into a number of Openstreetmap contributions
seldom spend their karma into vandalism, so my experience is that
patrolling contributions by new users catches most deliberate mayhem.

___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[James]

Even if we had a Git pull request sort of mechanism, who would "approve"
edits? DWG? They are volunteers and wouldn't have time to validate the
millions of changesets that would come in. On the opposite end of the
spectrum, people could just flat out deny good edits which would make many
leave. Putting a restriction on "new" accounts is easily bypassable by
creating an account make a couple(30+ good changesets(very small)) wait a
couple days, then deface the map. The more restrictions you put, the
smarter people will get (just look at CAPTCHA, for bots, people would
upload images of captchas to a service which real people would solve and
return the answer to the bots). It's OPENStreetMap, not CLOSEDStreetMap

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 10:48 AM, Clifford Snow 
wrote:

>
> On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 6:47 AM, Manohar Erikipati 
> wrote:
>
>> - DWG currently acts promptly on incidents reported via email, but we
>> need a more accessible mechanism that allows new users to report such
>> incidents directly from the website or editors. The email details and
>> existence of DWG, is only available currently in the wiki [3]
>
> - Auto-blocking known vandals to prevent repeated attacks [4]
>
> - An organised repository to report and learn from previous attacks. There
>> seems to have been an effort to do this many years ago on the wiki [5]
>
> - More visibility, awareness of QA tools and history tab on the OSM
>> homepage. Most of the really powerful QA tools like osmhv and osmose are
>> only known to advanced users.
>
>
>
>> It would be great to hear more approaches that could protect the map
>> against common mistakes and intentional attacks. Much of the world lacks an
>> active mapping community, so it is up to a small set of power mappers to
>> catch and revert most of the bad edits [6]. Building better support systems
>> to respond to bad edits could help more experienced mappers focus on
>> community building activities.
>
>
> Manohar,
> My experience is most of these edits can be cleaned up easily with simple
> edits. Some need full reverting, which can be done using JOSM, while others
> need careful pruning of the bad but leaving the good. I've fixed numerous
> pokemon edits in Washington State. I've only had to go to DWG 2or 3 time. I
> don't think we need to involve DWG in every case.
>
> I've send changeset comments and messages. Other than one belligerent
> individual who promised to report me if I kept reverting his phony edits,
> I've never heard back from any of them. There have been a number of example
> of appropriate changeset comments posted on talk and talk-us that let the
> mapper know the behavior isn't appreciated but also encourages them to
> become an active contributor. I suspect pokemon players could become
> prolific mappers.
>
> A tool that flags new parks, don't just look for named parks, but all
> parks - some of the players haven't gotten the word that it's only named
> parks, and new water features would be useful. Right now Ian Dees has a bot
> running on slack [1] and IRC[2] that picks up new users from the changeset
> feed. Sure it would be nice of someone could develop a similar bot to watch
> for new users adding pokemon features. But until we have that tool we
> really need to encourage more people to watch edits in their area.
>
> Best,
> Clifford
>
> [1] https://osmus.slack.com/messages/new-mappers
> [2]  irc://irc.oftc.net #osm-bot
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> @osm_seattle
> osm_seattle.snowandsnow.us
> OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
>
> ___
> talk mailing list
> talk@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>
>


-- 
外に遊びに行こう！
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Clifford Snow]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 6:47 AM, Manohar Erikipati 
wrote:

> - DWG currently acts promptly on incidents reported via email, but we need
> a more accessible mechanism that allows new users to report such incidents
> directly from the website or editors. The email details and existence of
> DWG, is only available currently in the wiki [3]

- Auto-blocking known vandals to prevent repeated attacks [4]

- An organised repository to report and learn from previous attacks. There
> seems to have been an effort to do this many years ago on the wiki [5]

- More visibility, awareness of QA tools and history tab on the OSM
> homepage. Most of the really powerful QA tools like osmhv and osmose are
> only known to advanced users.



> It would be great to hear more approaches that could protect the map
> against common mistakes and intentional attacks. Much of the world lacks an
> active mapping community, so it is up to a small set of power mappers to
> catch and revert most of the bad edits [6]. Building better support systems
> to respond to bad edits could help more experienced mappers focus on
> community building activities.


Manohar,
My experience is most of these edits can be cleaned up easily with simple
edits. Some need full reverting, which can be done using JOSM, while others
need careful pruning of the bad but leaving the good. I've fixed numerous
pokemon edits in Washington State. I've only had to go to DWG 2or 3 time. I
don't think we need to involve DWG in every case.

I've send changeset comments and messages. Other than one belligerent
individual who promised to report me if I kept reverting his phony edits,
I've never heard back from any of them. There have been a number of example
of appropriate changeset comments posted on talk and talk-us that let the
mapper know the behavior isn't appreciated but also encourages them to
become an active contributor. I suspect pokemon players could become
prolific mappers.

A tool that flags new parks, don't just look for named parks, but all parks
- some of the players haven't gotten the word that it's only named parks,
and new water features would be useful. Right now Ian Dees has a bot
running on slack [1] and IRC[2] that picks up new users from the changeset
feed. Sure it would be nice of someone could develop a similar bot to watch
for new users adding pokemon features. But until we have that tool we
really need to encourage more people to watch edits in their area.

Best,
Clifford

[1] https://osmus.slack.com/messages/new-mappers
[2]  irc://irc.oftc.net #osm-bot






-- 
@osm_seattle
osm_seattle.snowandsnow.us
OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk

Re: [OSM-talk] Responding to vandalism

[Bas Couwenberg]

On 2017-03-16 14:47, Manohar Erikipati wrote:

It would be great to hear more approaches that could protect the map
against common mistakes and intentional attacks. Much of the world
lacks an active mapping community, so it is up to a small set of power
mappers to catch and revert most of the bad edits [6]. Building better
support systems to respond to bad edits could help more experienced
mappers focus on community building activities.


This is a symptom of the extremely low barrier of entry and lack of 
guidance of new contributors. Anyone can signup and start breaking the 
production database.


OSM lacks a good staging area where new contributors can experiment and 
learn without breaking the production data.


Setting up your own fork of OSM for personal use like these kind of 
fictional maps is also too high, you need a powerful and costly server 
to handle the full planet and have good rendering performance.


It would be awesome to have a GitHub-like workflow for OSM, where users 
fork main planet and make their customization and submit pull requests 
to get their changes merged back into the planet. But the resources 
required for this are simply too great.


Introducing restrictions on what new mappers can edit may also help, 
editing well mapped areas is non-trivial with routes and turn 
restrictions on roads, large multipolygons for different landuses, etc. 
New mappers should learn how to work in those environments without 
breaking things before they can change those objects.


I consider OSM a database were geospatial data is integrated like 
software is in Linux distributions. None of the established 
distributions allow new contributors to upload their changes to 
production environments without review, OSM shouldn't either.


The current free-for-all policy is fine for unmapped areas, there you 
want a low barrier of entry for new contributors without too much 
bureaucracy, but in well mapped areas different policies should apply.


Kind Regards,

Bas

___
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk