“If the changeset isn’t really my work”. Yeah that sounds like a reasonable way of looking at it to me too. I don’t think that is really at odds with what DWG have been saying actually. Because of the hostile nature of discussions, they’re seeming to take quite a hard stance on this, but the fact of the matter is, if everybody using this data had been doing it carefully, importing small areas, applying manual checks, and preferably trying to back up contributions with local knowledge and surveys (i.e. uploading their data with their account) … DWG would never have stepped in. It might even not be classed as an “import”. There’s fuzzy line there somewhere, and fuzzy lines are bad news when it comes to making rules and enforcing rules (so besides the hostility of the situation, this is the other reason DWG have repeated a clear rule) But no matter how fuzzy the line is, some people have been stepping way over it, importing massive numbers of buildings and clearly not doing any manual checks i.e. very definitely “bulk importing”.

I reckon this is actually failure of the documentation and advice being given to these people. Thanks for making some wiki edits. I think we can go further with this:

You will have noticed that on a lot of english wiki pages we have this warning template, linking to the import guidelines. This will seem a little overbearing to people doing imports and the people who created the wiki pages in the first place, but it has been established as a way of framing the issue of imports and setting the tone for careful and considered behaviour regarding imports. I would expect this to be replicated on French language wiki pages too. We need a translation of that template, and I would expect it to appear on the ‘cadastre’ homepage there. It’s good that the import guidelines have been translated into french, so let’s link those more prominently.

These days I mostly map without even using GPS. Take notes and photos and use bing imagery (great resolution in London). But in situations where GPS is needed, I do tend use my camera as a kind of waypointing tool, so for example if I’m walking along a footpath that crosses a river, I’ll take one photo as I approach the bridge, to help me see what this thing is, and then as I cross the middle of the river, I’ll fire a photo of the river. This can be blurry as hell. It doesn’t matter. It’s purely for the purposes of having a precise position of the middle of the bridge at the point here the river crosses. …obviously that kind of use doesn’t work too well if your phone is buggering up precision in the EXIF data!

Interesting. Good that you’ve tested with QGIS too, so we can say that this definitely nothing to do with JOSM EXIF handling.

Your phone, Samsung GT-S5300, is not writing enough digits of precision into the EXIF tags… which is silly isn’t it? Are they trying to save space? I wonder how many phones have that kind of problem.

Another problem I think I see with my ZTE android phone, is that it takes a while to “warm up” the GPS, so if you ask it to geotag photos, it gets a much better more accurate location if you are running a trace or something else using the GPS in the background.

The story doesn’t start there though. Before that a user for some reason uploads many thousands of objects. Users who do that have been receiving such a message from DWG (only a douzen or so users).

Before that these users have read information on the wiki about how to peform a Cadastre data import. Maybe it’s information and advice laid out by the community leaders, or maybe it’s information you’re collectively muddling towards agreeing upon. Or maybe they learn how to upload cadastre data from chatting to people on the mailing list… “community leaders”, or just others who’ve figured it out.

It seems a little bit false to blame so much drama on this terrible insult of (a douzen users) receiving an email written in English. But speaking of language differences, from a quick sampling of French language discussions via google tanslate, I see people bad-mouthing DWG/foundation and talking about the arrogant anglox-saxon hedgemony. I can hope that google translate is getting that wrong, but it looks very much like battle lines being drawn, all of which is ridiculous and entirely unnecessary. Everybody, DWG included, are volunteers working to make OpenStreetMap better. If nobody speaking French is willing inject some sanity into these discussions then that is a very sad thing indeed.

But I want to look beyond all of the hot air of debate and understand why these users are uploading so many objects in the first place. I think you’ve said that the Cadastre data is being brought in carefully, importing small areas, applying manual checks, and preferably trying to back up contributions with local knowledge and surveys. I’ve just been using google translate on the the Cadastre import information I can’t see anywhere cautioning users about the problems of bulk imports, and explaining the way data should be brought in carefully. Is that information there? and could it be made more prominent?

To me it seems french community leaders are failing to take in the simple message and adjust the advice to french mappers accordingly. There aren’t enough French language speakers working with the DWG to get the advice right on how to carry out this import. Instead there seems to be all kinds of french language discussions resulting in frustration and people working against DWG

I see Frederik (DWG and the OSMF board) very patiently replying and discussing in the talk-fr mailing list: here, here, and in particular he is also frustrated with the cyclical nature of discussions here. It’s clear from both your perspectives that DWG are repeatedly stating the rules, and people are repeatedly ignoring them. But the line taken by DWG is not hardline as you seem to be suggesting.

DWG have a very difficult task, because they do have the ability to block users and they are expected use it to protect our database from problematic edits, but of course that is difficult to do without upsetting people. This goes for any language, and inevitably inches towards awkward issues of project governance. Thankfully the friendly OpenStreetMap community has so far mostly avoided going too deep into the kind of policies and power structures we see in wikipedia, but every time things get unfriendly, things nudge in that direction.

Let’s keep it friendly.

Yeah it’s quite hidden away hey? The credits could be equally hidden away. We don’t necessarily require it to be on the map. But if they did want to put it on the map, there some examples here of using OSM maps with google maps javascript Could do with some better examples to be honest though. Needs a bit of work.

The OpenStreetMap license change affects the credit text to use, but that of course also depends on whether Stamen are basing off new ODbL licensed data (in which case they’ll need to update their “How to Use These Tiles Elsewhere” advice) So actually now is not a good time to be asking web developers to add credits in this way, because they may need to adjust them again some time soon. All a bit awkward at the moment. But anyway the post license change credit requirements are described here.

Well in this case I don’t think it’s important that the map shows their pub name. That’s what the marker indicates. No the main problem with map is those dreadful tube station labels

Hmm well I was thinking of London but … No actually anywhere in the world. I’m sure we can make arrangements

Also any pub which can’t figure out how to switch to OSM. Just have your laptop at the bar ready! :-)

Error reporting via photo upload we don’t have yet. That’s a good idea. We have a system called OpenStreetBugs for text based bug reporting. This website probably works ok on a mobile. There’s an API too. Not sure if that has been integrated into any native mobile apps, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Navit and OSMAnd have it (not sure). But a dedicated app for just this, might be good. And photo support as you say. There’s actually two categories of bugs. Things which somebody is reporting, as data from the real world, to be added, and things where the data/map looks wrong and we need a survey in the real world to resolve it. So a photo might be part of creating a new bug, or solving a bug in fact. We can think of it as sending a local person on a mission to get a photo of something specific. OpenStreetBugs is set to be incorporated onto the main OpenStreetMap.org front page, so that will bring these ideas to the fore I think.

Congratulations. For more numbers see How did you contribute

The cockerel in front of the guitar shop… is it real?

I was forgetting Martijn’s bing viewer shows reveals the metadata about when the imagery was captured. I gather this isn’t always correct, but it’s saying May 2012 for central London, which seems plausible.

Also bing have blogged about worldwide roll-out of new imagery. Great news for OpenStreetMap!

@compdude. Yes. Why don’t we look to what wikipedia does: “Operation of unapproved bots, or use of approved bots in unapproved ways outside their conditions of operation, is prohibited”. Wikipedia has rules like this because… oh look. All the same reasons woodpeck was stating in relation to OpenStreetMap. “Assume good faith” does not mean wikipedia lets everyone romp around screwing things up with automated edits

And while we’re talking about assuming things, how about assuming that Frederik and others know what they’re talking about when it comes to the technologies and data structures behind OpenStreetMap. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with questioning things. And actually the diagram at the top here is rather good. Perhaps it could help to frame an interesting discussion about how OSM could more efficiently store historical data.

Unfortunately this feels like it is posted in the spirit a know-it-all justification for poor behaviour. If you think all these problems are solved with more disk space and “disk space is cheap”, well that all sounds wonderfully simple. Maybe you should go set up your own OpenStreetMap to show us all how it’s done. You could allow yourself to run lots of bot edits on it. Good luck with that. In the meantime you would be welcome to raise constructive questions while showing some humility and politeness towards those who designed and built the system.

On a practical tagging level, I don’t really think Kayle is right. is_in is a bad tag, I’d hope that one day we might purge it. I can also see your point of view that people laughing and having fun with the ‘Worst of OSM’ site is not a very positive/pro-active approach to fixing problems in OSM data.

But you were banned for making automated edits without discussing it properly. You probably think you’re clever because you figured out how to run a bot. That’s not clever. Clever is persuading and getting the community on your side with your ideas for sweeping changes. If you get annoyed and start talking about going to war against people in the community who work hard to build and protect it… then nobody is going to find you very persuasive.

So don’t be annoyed. Try to discuss more and work on being more persuasive

Congratulations. Your nice mapping photo is on the featured on the OSM wiki Main Page this week.

Sorry the timing didn’t work out for meeting up with you while I was on holiday in Brazil. You were on another hackerbus trip? I had a lot of OSM related fun while I was there anyway

Congratulations. Your nice mapping photo is on the featured on the OSM wiki Main Page this week.

Sorry the timing didn’t work out for meeting up with you while I was on holiday in Brazil. You were on another hackerbus trip? I had a lot of OSM related fun while I was there anyway

Wiki page for Sports Tracker. I was going to suggest you update that with more details of the app, but… were you talking about sportstracker.nokia.com ? It seems to have been shut down by nokia now :-( What are the best alternatives offered via the ovi store? (should put those details on the wiki page)

oopse. Try again. This time with working links

Awesome! Looks like you had a lot of fun. I Love the photographs especially this one and this one. I think one of those would make a great featured image on the wiki if you’re willing to open license it (?)

I see there’s a bit of an unfortunate boundary of the bing imagery coverage in Ribeirão Preto making for a weird shaped map. I always think this kind of thing presents an interesting problem which possibly has an interesting hardware hacking solution. Maybe a challenge for the Garoa Hacker Clube hey? :-)

I’m about to email Cloudmiro and Diogo with some details of my visit to SP (possible dates for a meet-up!) I can’t copy you in because I don’t know your email address, but I’ll send a message with the same.

Awesome! Looks like you had a lot of fun. I Love the photographs especially this one and this one. I think one of those would make a great featured image on the wiki if you’re willing to open license it (?)

I see there’s a bit of an unfortunate boundary of the bing imagery coverage in Ribeirão Preto making for a weird shaped map. I always think this kind of thing presents an interesting problem which possibly has an interesting hardware hacking solution. Maybe a challenge for the Garoa Hacker Clube hey? :-)

I’m about to email Cloudmiro and Diogo with some details of my visit to SP (possible dates for a meet-up!) I can’t copy you in because I don’t know your email address, but I’ll send a message with the same.

"apparent standpoint"? I've tried to reflect a balance of viewpoints and lay out some guidelines to prevent damage being done, and any future antagonism this can cause. If you find the armchair mapping guidelines to be so shocking that you're going to quit OSM, then well that seems like a ludicrous standpoint to me. If you'd prefer to have a level-headed discussion about the guidelines, head over to Talk:Armchair_mapping.

Here Alex is proposing the idea of encouraging/inviting a form of armchair mapping within London data. When people appear so shocked to be asked to do it carefully... that makes me quite uneasy about the idea.