@BushmanK: I have to agree with you, people who use Maps.me don’t realize what the OSM community is really about. The general clunkiness of the UI (ie. bad UX) and very weird wording (implying normal OSM mappers are “moderators”) does not help at all.

Zverik, if you want to show good will, maybe implement the community index and show it to the users after uploading their changesets?

For notes - there could be status categories which can be selected for each note:

awaiting new imagery - to allow a basic outline of the construction area and/or new roads needs a GPS survey - driving/cycling/walking through needs a full survey - to get all of the street names and details

That’s what I envisioned, although storing such info outside OSM DB, in a Flask app.

Making it easier to triage / label notes could be so beneficial as it would make it a true “bug tracking” system.

Imagine “needs survey” notes could be given to even inexperienced users so they could make a photo (or GPS track) and help us this way.

I have noticed a trend that user blocks are more and more “requested” for things that were accepted in past (i.e. not responding messages/empty changeset comments etc

I am fine with this. OSM is a social project, after all. Keep in mind these are probably 0-day (blocked until message is read) blocks.

What is the reason for publishing the stigma of a received user block on his/her profile page as well as in the “list of shame” [2] over a period of more than 8 years now?

The practice shows that unreasonable people tend to stay unreasonable. You can always search changesets or forum for discussion on said user.

I, for one, am fine with stricter DWG policy. To earn a block you have to make some mess, anyway.

There are some quite active mappers who feel discouraged to edit because of misbehaving users not being dealt with in timely manner.

Though, I have to agree that notifications should be made harder to miss e.g. by listing them on the website and not relying solely on e-mail.

OAuth is a safer and more fine-grained (individual permissions like add notes, edit map) method of logging in. This way JOSM or whatever app doesn’t have to store your password, because it gets a key just for it to use. The added benefit is you can later revoke access to your account for an app without changing your password (in the settings at OSM.org).

This is like “log in with Facebook” - third party apps don’t know your password, but only the key Facebook login page returned to them.

Well, there’s also another thing to consider - whose changesets are more commented on :) Should I just reorder the bars?

Just or the reference - daysClosed is only passed to OSM API, it isn’t used when loading notes from a file. So you can’t do this in JOSM.

@Zabot: I think he means things like right colors, gamma correction etc.

Have you thought of OSM validation before? What other big questions should we all be thinking about?

I think we should deal with errors/vandalism right as they happen. Too often we see questionable edits to only find out the user is inactive.

It would make sense to come with some recommended practices how to communicate with users (wrt. wording, content and call to action - which anecdotally seems to increase chances of response / fixing). Then sometimes I don’t know what to do if a user who is still editing doesn’t respond - after all it seems to be a little over-the-top to report every non-communicating user to the DWG. Maybe we could look into giving more people the ability to make until-read-message user blocks.

Other thing is to especially monitor countries with very little established community (in practice everything except Europe, NA, Japan and few more countries). The amount of sloppy edits that go under the radar is too high for a quality map we strive to be. And, in the long term, we should help these countries to grow an autonomous, self-healing community - which doesn’t really need much resources besides people’s time and Internet access.

Finally, the problems should be eliminated at the source. Many of them seem to stem from shortcomings of iD. I always feel awkward when making a changeset comment that boils down to “hey, you made a mistake, but you couldn’t have known that because it was caused by deficiency of iD” (real-world example: 1) no support of addr:place 2) people adding names to addresses instead of making correctly tagged POIs). While I’ve seen bhousel (the maintainer) change his stance a little bit, there’s still too little awareness on how iD could do a better job to guide users and be more foolproof.

of those that do stay on, a large number (this is simply based on experience and not hard numbers) seem to be want to be left alone

Of course some people are that way, but in principle you shouldn’t want to be left alone - after all OSM is a social activity, with cooperation and its rules (written or non-written) shaped (and changing over time) by the community. If you want to edit, you should also socialize, at least minimally. We’re not Google Maps with faceless moderators. I think the current onboarding process (and the OSM website) doesn’t stress this enough,

What is going on in here? It seems that this is a false positive even though high confidence is reported. I checked other sources and they agree with OSM.

http://improve-osm.org/#53.5882445,14.8189688,16/OPEN/true,1-1-0/true,1-1-1/true,0-0

From what I’ve been reading, Japanese OSM is… specific. Whoever makes these “State of OSM in $country” blog posts should definitely make solid research into Japan.

There is only a single post on the “users: Japan” subforum! It’s about channels of contact, pointing at talk-ja among others. But still if it’s their primary means of discussion (couldn’t find other forums), talk-ja has a puny volume for a 100M country.

I dunno, Japanese and East Asians in general (even ignoring the China with their Great Firewall) seem to isolate themselves on the Internet and roll their own portals for everything. How does it fit in the context of global OSM?

http://www.tofugu.com/2012/07/31/isolationism-on-the-japanese-web/

I blame the iD editor on most of these lousy edits. Its interface makes one seem they are guided, but they aren’t really. For example, people notoriously add everything related to medical care as a hospital. Also, no validation whatsoever, nor info about Bing imagery callibration. There’s better imagery with 100% coverage in Poland (Geoportal), which has no clouds and is perfectly callibrated. (It loads slower, though).

The turorial seems really dumb. People will know how to draw areas, duh. I think that a good idea would be to make goal-oriented minitutorials like “I want to… Draw buildings/ Add one-way to part of a street / Add an address”, which will explain how to draw buildings properly, or how to cut streets to apply different attributes, or that when you add an address in a village without street names you have to use addr:place.

The problem is that presets simply don’t convey all the info about how to map them, which people should know - every country has their own specifics. People should be warned not to tag objects as something other just because they couldn’t find a fitting tag.

There should be more power delegated to local communities, it’s annoying and counter-productive that you have to write to the DWG every time to get people messing with the map blocked (Or as I heard there’s “block until message is read” ). People not responding to messages are quite a problem.

There was a HUGE influx of mappers in Poland that was caused by press coverage. Some people added useful data like shops, some data didn’t quite make sense (like an address node with only a name, or area=yes). But also, newbies deleted things like fire hydrants which had to be reverted.

We have a page listing new users: http://openstreetmap.pl/users/ . At the time of that influx, I tried to check people’s changesets using OSMHV, fix them and message them. With current tools, there’s simply not enough human throughput to review changes. We also use http://osmapa.pl/w/zmiany/diff.php , but it’s not always up to date (lags a hour or two). It helps spot obvious deletions, though.

Why I can’t make any fixes in Poland (or other countries, for that matter)? You should at least make it clear about the availability.