I like this idea for diary entry. Although a matter of personal preference, it’s helpful to know which plugins people have found useful (and which not). Maybe you should put them in order of usefulness

Sorry we didn’t manage to solve your challenge Mind you, we were trying (in the pub) to design a solution to the harder challenge of not only making a captcha which uses OpenStreetMap, but a ReCAPTCHA-like system which would gather helpful data for OpenStreetMap. Maybe we should do a more basic thing first.

Welcome! Check out the Przewodnik dla początkujących

Ah you’re right. There has been a some sort of warning on that page since mid 2011. When I discussed with you before I was asking for that to be made more prominent, and to link to further reading. At that time I was also pointing out that the general top level page about the Cadastre carried no warning.

In any case, the wiki’s only one thing. Overall the french community failed to communicate properly to all of their users, that they should not do clumsy bulk importing, and clearly in french OSM forums their hasn’t been enough discussion about the importance of this. If the french community buy into those the ideas, then why do we see the so much vitriol directed at the DWG? The french community FAILED to communicate these messages correctly and then to add insult to injury they have FAILED to support the enforcement of common sense rules. Instead of recognising that certain people had obviously been bulking importing (behaving badly), they somehow found it more natural to jump to the conclusion that DWG are evil. I find that very disappointing. The DWG have behaved in a very reasonable manner in my opinion. You clearly disagree, but it’s very disappointing that seemingly nobody speaking french has been willing to stick up for them.

@chriscf as mentioned, sysadmins dropped some spam users

“I refuse to brag using manipulated statistical data.” Well of course you’re are very welcome to brag about OpenStreetMap with whatever supporting facts you like. But 1 million users is a good news story this week. It’s not a manipulated statistic. As I’ve explained, it’s the least manipulated of several possible statistics we could look at.

You seem to be confused about “sign-out procedures”. You can of course very easily “sign out”… being the opposite of “sign in”. The opposite of doing a “sign up” to create a new user account, would be to destroy your user account, an operation which people rarely have any sensible reason to want to do, and which presents all kinds of problems in terms of IDs cross-referencing of contributions. If a user has some sort of unusual privacy concern and they want to remove all identifying information, they can very easily change their ‘Display name’, and remove their ‘Description’, ‘Home location’ fields. Beyond that sysadmins can label as a user account as ‘deleted’, but non of this is a regular operation that any normal user would want to worry about. It’s not something a user who is no longer interested in OpenStreetMap would want to go through, and it’s certainly not something we’d want to make easy to do by accident. If you think I’m saying something deeply mysterious or nefarious here, please have a look at… well any other sign-up website on the internet.

The issue at hand is all those users who have signed-up on the site, failed to make an edit, and then not come back. “Signing out” has got nothing to do with it. So what we could do (and this has been suggested before), is email a questionnaire to those users. Or we could just email them just asking them to come back!

Of all the different contact channels we have within OpenStreetMap, a diary entry is probably the worst one to use for pointing out server problems.

Got an example of that Rovastar? I found an example using both natural=sand and surface=sand. Not sure which of two gets rendered as yellow

mmm. Camera flavoured pizza

Yes. Sometimes I feel the same

I guess you mean 2013. Would be great have beers with Croatian OSMers! I’ve put it in my diary. We can do beers on Saturday 19th or maybe we could do another weekend-long event that weekend.

I just remembered another thing we talked about. Leaflets. Andy’s nearly run out. We should get some more printed. Also jack showed off many free T-shirts etc. We should have OpenStreetMap T-shirts

Aha! I wondered if someone would ask that :-) I have two phones. My android phone (which I lost) only had one number in the contact list… for my other phone. Nice chap called, and said he’s holding onto it for me. I went to get it back the next day. Sweet!

I am pulling quite a strange face in the first photo hey? Think I should stick to stupid grins in future

“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