@Glassman,

Human beings are social animals, after all. All social animals have a concept of negative response on actions, unwanted within a group. And of a positive response on ones that benefit it. This is completely normal for people to say, that unwanted actions are “bad” while useful ones are “good”. Adding fake objects to gain something in Pokemon Go (probably) gives a person some profit (Pokemon creatures he wants), so that is a positive feedback. By sending encouragement letters, you can increase useful outcome, because these individuals don’t really have an intent to vandalize data - your encouragement doesn’t contradict anything they want. However, there is nothing in it that prevents them from continuing adding fake stuff because they haven’t received a negative response that “cancels” their profit. And that should be something significant because Pokemon creatures are important for them.

Your approach seems more like a method of teaching non-social animals, who have no concept of negative corrective actions and perceive them as a threat. Cats, for example. You can easily teach a cat to do some tricks by rewarding it for something you like, but you can’t make it stop peeing in your slippers with any kind of negative feedback - it just thinks you are an aggressor who has something against it. Fortunately, the vast majority of people are not like cats, even if sometimes they are quite far from being smart.

So, please, don’t imagine things like “it’s a quality problem” - no, it’s an intentionally and deliberately added fake object that even says in its name tag that it’s not an actual park or it’s a “Pokemon Go path”. Think about an actual motivation. They want their imaginary creatures closer to their home or school, that’s all.

As I said above, anyone is absolutely free to exercise being an all-loving person. But not in expense of data quality.

@SomeoneElse,

The first question: are you aware of this Reddit thread? Because if no, then now you are. It doesn’t actually matter if Niantic is actually using OSM data to generate Pokemon Go “nests” - it is enough that there is a rumor that it is. I mean, enough for Pokemon Go players to start adding obviously fake objects.

I am perfectly aware of that kind of view, that if a person adds tons of fake information and just one real McDonald’s, it is probably a potential new mapper. But again, if we are trying to give data consumers a reliable map (or “the best map in the world”), removing numerous fake objects is more important than trying to teach misbehaving kids. That has never been an objective of this project. And nobody here has an obligation to do that. If you, personally, would like to do that - neither me nor anyone else will stop you. But that shouldn’t be done at expense of data quality. So, removing trash first, teaching - after that.

Regarding of welcome messages - let’s imagine a simple situation: there are several kids who discovered that the hallway of your apartment building is nice and warm, so they can hang out there, smoke weed and drink beer when it’s cold outside. One of them, out of boredom, fixed a door knob, but after that, they left empty beer cans, scratched their names on the wall and so on. What would you do: call the police first or express your gratitude for fixing a door handle? I’m not trying to convince you here, I’m trying to figure out, are you living in the real world.

And what I believe is that there should be another rumor, saying that all kinds of fake stuff will be more or less immediately removed, so they shouldn’t even try adding it. Because, regarding of “what should we do” - there is no way to tell if something is real or fake if there are no other active users in an area (like in these two cases above) or these kids aren’t “smart” enough to make their fake objects so obvious.

@marczoutendijk, this is just another person who thinks that diaries are for reporting map errors. There are three of them in a row and that would be nice to find out, who the hell gave them this wrong idea.

Please, use Notes instead of Diaries to mark errors and missing information osm.wiki/Notes

Please, use Notes instead of Diaries to mark errors and missing information osm.wiki/Notes

Please, use Notes instead of Diaries to mark errors and missing information osm.wiki/Notes

@SomeoneElse, unfortunately, using a single example to discredit a whole practice looks more like a fallacious reasoning. Examples could serve as an illustration of some logical statement that explains, what is fundamentally wrong with a certain approach, but can’t be used as a reliable argument against it by themselves. Actually, they can, but only against the very specific type of claim - when someone says that something is perfect, but that’s not the case here. I mean, you might be right and Wikipedia has a fundamental flaw, but you haven’t presented a general description of it.

“A cool project” in this case reflects a view of a certain fraction of mappers, who think that OSM is something for having fun while demanding any improvement of data quality ruins that fun for them. A good illustration of that could be a case when you telling some “fun mapper” that he uses a wrong tag, violates a requirement of verifiability or something else, and he tells you to f**k off because you are too serious and refers to the “any tags you like” rule. Without a well-defined fundamental goal, that says nothing about mapping for fun, it is nearly impossible to explain, why data consistency is more important than some anarchist’s enjoyment of playing with the iD.

@salmin, exactly. As I said above, there is a large fraction of people who don’t consider quality really important (or more important than something else), because they have a different motivation - having fun, socializing (mapping parties, conferences and so on), humanitarian projects.

Obviously, I’m not saying that we have to kick these people out because they don’t think that quality is important (while some people do think that I’m always proposing something like that). I’m saying that to improve the quality there should be at least a minimum requirement to test different stuff against it.

@SomeoneElse, @salmin - indeed, OSM is different from Wikipedia. And the main difference seems to be in an attitude. I’m not an expert on Wikipedia, but it looks like people there often like to categorize and systematize things (it is even has been mentioned in the welcoming article for Wikipedia editors in the OSM Wiki). While in OSM anarchism and individualism are very strong. Otherwise, there would be some real rules already, instead of “recommendations”. There is even no clear goal definition (like “making the best map”) - a lot of people exercising a “recreational” mapping just for a personal fun, which obviously doesn’t require any quality standards, for example.

And exactly because of that, I’m saying that installing a direct government is bad and unrealistic measure. At the same time, developing a set of guidelines doesn’t look that unrealistic. For example, smaller part of the OSM project have something like that, just like OSM Carto (also known as Standard) style goal definition.

@Zverik, that’s pathetic, as expected from you.

@Zverik,

Do you see the difference between a group of people who have to decide on each particular case and a group of people who helps to write a law that doesn’t always need to be enforced because not everyone wants to break it?

But looking at the caricature of rules you have created for the Russian OSM forum, it doesn’t seem like you can understand it because you prefer the “manual” style of governance when you always have the last word due to a vague law that always must be interpreted instead of having a clear regulation.

@Владимир К, или “вдоль контура/края крон” или “вокруг крон”.

Вот английский получился истинно варварским, с изменением смысла до неузнаваемости (“поверх/через” вместо “вокруг”, например). Если что, сигнальте, я помогу с переводом.

@Balthus★MC,

I can’t be 100% sure, however, Wikipedia.org is a public international project, not a website of some authority. So, authorities can, probably, publish copies of official documents on Wikipedia, but it can not be used as the only place to publish original information - it will not work in any country by legal reasons because Wikipedia articles can be edited by anybody. So, I don’t really need to read Thai to know how Wikipedia works and how it doesn’t. If you saying that there is a representative of some Thai authority editing this page, then who of these users is that?

And I don’t really understand, why you immediately getting defensive when I’m pointing at your misunderstanding - that is not a good way to improve the quality of what you doing, it’s the way to be left alone with your mistakes.

Obviously, you, being a native Thai speaker, can find an original source of a certain information, or find that there is no such source published online and get it from, for example, a printed text of some law or regulation.

There was a discussion of full syntax for turn lanes vs. shortened one somewhere already. While shortened one is completely correct, full syntax (without skipping “none”) is more human-readable and less prone to human error.

Wikipedia page has not been created by an official person or somebody like that - it was by a regular people. And the rule of Wikipedia is that any information should be taken from a trusted source, so there should be a note, where these codes were taken from (a government website, some document or whatever), and that’s the best source.

Technically, Wikipedia is not always the best source. This article should have a reference to the original document, law or regulation, where they’ve got this information from. That should be a source for these codes, not Wikipedia itself.

@Balthus★MC, always welcome.

I want to add, that in this project, there are a lot of “de-facto” things, results of a human factor, mistakes, even unnoticed vandalism. But it doesn’t mean it is good or even normal. Only if we will do our best to improve data quality, we would see a progress here instead of stagnation (or even degradation).

If “standard de-facto” contradicts the basic rules, it is a bad standard. Fake “English” names are rubbish. I can’t make anybody to delete it, but not having a rubbish data is better than having it in the database. However, some places (like big cities and towns, well-known outside the country) could actually have names in English or any other language. But not every tiny village or road.

Road numbers are a bit different story. If there is an official (issued by some government authority) list of codes of roads or provinces, that uses Latin letters for the purpose of the internationalization, it is completely correct and acceptable to use int_ref= key to store it. But only if these romanized codes actually exist. If it is just for the purpose of easier conversion for the navigator - that would be wrong.

So, the proper variant with existing codes would be something like that: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=tertiary https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:ref=ชบ.1095 https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:int_ref=CBI.1095 - you don’t really need a separate national reference tag because it is only needed if it is different from the reference number (it happens, for example, if a reference code is assigned by a local authority while national reference - by the government of the whole country).

@Balthus★MC, Please, reply here.

But I need a Solution for our problem not a negative critic. As you may noticed there are no English road names in Thailand at all. But in practise most of the Thai roads are using the name:en” tag for the Romanized version of the Thai name. So what is your solution?

The fact that you need a solution doesn’t give you a right to break the rules of the project. There are a lot of people who want to use OSM for their own purpose. If everyone will do whatever they want, there would be a mess here and nothing else. So, your argumentation is fallacious and actions you are proposing are disrespectful.

If a name can be romanized (transliterated) automatically, it must be done during the data processing before making a map for a navigator, not in the OSM database. Just like it is made for many countries with a non-Latin alphabet on https://www.openstreetmap.de/karte.html That is the right solution that respects rules of this project.