On 20/04/2018 16:13, Ian Dees wrote:
Some questions: Was this action made under the auspices of the Data Working Group?
No
Has the "directed mapping" policy been approved by the OSMF?
No, although the refusal to interact with other mappers and the mass creation of sock-puppet accounts to avoid doing so would I think qualify under the ban policy https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Ban_Policy .
To be clear - there are a number of different mappers here. They appear to be using the same customised copy of iD; we don't know what imagery they're using or whether it's licence-compatible with OSM (I suspect based on comments that at least some isn't, but can't be sure). The mappers involved have been less than informative about who they're working for (of course, they may not actually know who this is - I'm guessing that this is organised through a "mechanical turk"-type site). They should, at least, be able to say what rules they are following though - and none of them that I have seen has given a reply that explains that yet (see for example https://openstreetmap.org/changeset/58023538 ).
Throughout this process I've tried to engage with each of the mappers involved (see the top of http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussion-comments?uid=61942&commented for examples) but have generally failed to do so.
Their changes have been of mostly two sorts - "fixing routing problems" and "missing service roads". The "fixing routing problems" was reported on talk-gb initially where at a guess 80% of the access changes were in error - a typical example is https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/57929974 , where an access restriction was changed because whatever rules they were following simply did not understand it. The German forum thread also found many issues caused by "fixing routing problems" in Germany.
The US situation is of course different - there are few access restrictions that might impede motor traffic mapped (and probably fewer physically per mile of road too). Many more of the US edits were of the "missing service roads" type, and there's generally less to go wrong there (although these do still warrant checking - I suspect that in https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/57730894 the assumption is that people drive on the left in Washington). Interestingly I note that in that mapper's case (see http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussion-comments?uid=7511407 ) the revert excluded North and South America, so there are still errors introduced by that particular mapper than need fixing. Other problems in the US include mapping roads likely to be private as residential/unclassified, which will cause some "interesting" routing, but that's a smaller subset.
One thing that would really help here would be if anyone has any idea who's behind this mapping to ask them to say who they are (either to the DWG, or to the communities in the places that they are editing). Given the concentration on places like LA and Denver it's likely to be someone who wants to do last-mile motor vehicle routing in the US. It's clear that they need a bit of help about how access tags in OSM work (including access not for motor vehicles) and I'm sure that lots of people in the OSM community would like to help with that. The current situation (leaving comments for mappers, having those comments ignored, being blocked temporarily for ignoring comments, creating sock-puppet accounts, rinse and repeat) is clearly not satisfactory.
Best Regards, Andy _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
