Legal questions on OSM activities in places like Pakistan

This is a real blocker in many countries that have outdated laws that only allow licensed institutions to survey and map. Google got into trouble in India a few years ago for having a mapmaker competition and the government shutdown the street view program as a risk to security. This opens up the fear for anyone of contributing to OSM or Mapillary which can potentially get one into trouble.

While its going to be hard for OSMF to offer protection to local chapters or change laws, what might help is if OSM as a project got the endorsement at a really high level like the UN as an essential project to help hit the Millennium Development Goals. This would help pave the way for a policy change of encouraging participatory mapping and recognize the project as a tool of citizen empowerment and development for a better world.

The efforts of OSM Bangladesh are an inspiration for the region to show how citizens can organize themselves to build critical products like map data faster, more detailed and at a lower cost than the government and make more efficient use of the available resources.

Wishing you much success and looking forward to learning from your experiences to grow the community in India.

What about just using URIs as identifiers?

The OSM URIs are a great reference to start with. @ makes sense for usernames that can change and # for permanent ids. Also using the JOSM id shorthands for nodes, ways, relations can give a more crisp identifier:

• https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/47401880 -> #c47401880 or just #47401880
• https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4774381279 -> #n4774381279
• https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/484686953 -> #w484686953
• https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/47401880/way/484457693 -> #47401880/w484457693
• https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/PlaneMad -> https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/PlaneMad

Note what you suggest, namely to automatically add a back-referencing changeset comment is much more obtrusive than the github feature which just silently adds a back-reference without a notification.

Excellent, so lets have a back reference without a notification.

or you could just be considerate and comment on the changeset that was reverted.

Its already being done. My suggestion is to use mentions to make it easier to navigate from one changeset thread to another.

How did you spot this changeset ? Was it by chance or do you at Mapbox check every changeset for suspicious edits ?

The team at Mapbox checks a random sample of possible suspicous changesets everyday using osmcha. We’re seeing what tools the community needs to better look after the local map.

Good catch, have marked the changeset as bad https://osmcha.mapbox.com/47129627/

You can track recent edits in Pretroria using these filters

This could be super handy to validate names and coordinates in Wikidata against OSM translations!

Or if there was a tool which kept an eye on any changes to important nodes?

Yes, it would be great if it was easier to know which landmarks in my country was recently modified. There are many important features in sparsely populated places that I would be interested to keep a watch on.

is that possible to be notified or find somewhere the modifications done to a specific area?

osm-qa-feeds gives RSS feeds for notes, changesets, new contributors and other qa errors in any area. Just discovered it myself on the wiki!

What I’d really like to read in this diary entry to make the story complete, is how these edits were actually spotted.

The data team at Mapbox regularly reviews changesets using https://osmcha.mapbox.com . Of course this is just a small percentage of changes, so theres many many more skipping anyones eyes.

Currently, maps.me user can more likely do something similar to it than anyone else

Don’t quite agree, its new users who are likely to do this rather than with any specific editor. Look at what happened today with iD @PlaneMad/diary/40722

Very cool!

Oh wow, congrats!

This works beautifully and is really the kind of data tool that should be more integrated as a layer in both Wikidata and OSM. Looking forward to exploring the data in other parts of the world =)

Wille, your work has been phenomenal in laying the groundwork for a more powerful community validation tool on OSM. For instance: list of all changesets with no additions and atleast 5 deletions in London.

Really excited with all the developments so far and what the future of OSMCHA looks like with a map interface!

Thank you for your work mcld! This opens up room to add so many more features that anyone using to a modern map these days is used to.

This is a beautiful post Joost, with some very nice approaches at evaluating the completeness of the map.

Wondering if you were able to find a pattern in what type of features were more actively mapped over time. Considering an active mapping community and declining edits on road features, was there a corresponding increase in edits to other types like addresses or turn restrictions?

From personal experience it seems like there is a very definite order in what features get completed on the map based on complexity and quantity of data to add: roughly roads, railways, street names, natural features, amenities, POIs, buildings, boundaries, navigation data, addresses. So maybe if the most heavily edited feature is addresses, it might point to more basic features like roads being more complete?

Also maybe numbers alone would never be able to tell objectively how ready a map is, the ultimate test might be to actually use the map successfully to navigate in the real world :)

This is amazing! This is probably the most detailed map of Andahuaylas ever made http://lxbarth.com/compare/?osm&google#18/-13.65673/-73.38886

Thank you saintam1, a big improvement from what it used to be :)

@reshma

Yu can see instructions on correcting the boundaries on a local tile server here: http://xsce.org/wiki/generating_map_tiles

“Data have no meaning if there is no use”

So true, we need great stories of how this data is being used for all of South Asia. Our governments have been trapped with proprietary data and platforms for too long at the cost of public money.

Looking forward to this year, I can already feel its going to be a hallmark one for OSM in the region.

Try MMI. From comparing the Himalayan village I fieldmapped Rakkar, I think the OSM data in MMI dates back to sometime in 2013. The changes I made in 2014 are not there.