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
