@Zverik in a world in which OSM had unlimited resources perhaps it would be possible to close our eyes to which contributor groups the project critically depends on and which not, but that isn’t reality.

In reality the project could easily survive and still be relevant with the 10% (or less) that contribute and maintain 90% of the data, the other way around clearly not. That doesn’t mean that the map isn’t better when we get input from those additional contributors, but it is also important to understand that many of them are not, as in really not, interested in any kind of long term relationship with OSM. RicoEletric has already covered most aspects of that.

And yes I believe we need to create low-impact, low-maintenance ways for such contributions to happen, that do not create extra load on the 10% of contributors that we really depend on, for example OSMyBiz. It can be argued that MAPS.ME was never that.

The thing is that roughly 2/3s of the annual contributors are new, see annual active contributors. And nearly all of them are short term to single edit contributors (and yes there is some correlation with tools and recruitment method, for example HOT) and while a larger pool of new mappers might lead to slightly more longer term contributors, conversion rates are so low that in practical terms even quite large changes in new contributor influx don’t make a big difference.

@G1asshouse in the 1st half of 2021 influx of new users from maps me / organic maps was still relatively “high” that is 7’881 vs 1’682 in the 2nd half, that is nearly exactly the difference you saw.

Taking a step back, the only metric that really matters for the project as a whole is that of reoccurring long term contributors. To anecdotally put that in perspective, the first 80’000 or so editors that used maps.me contributed less than I have in my OSM career, and I’m by far not a particularly large OSM contributor. The statement should seen less as a dismissal of the long tail of contributors, but more a statement of that the continued viability of the project lies elsewhere.

The question always was if the minor contributors even had a remote idea on what they were adding, there is definitely no indication that it was ever a source of regular contributors in any form.

As a vehicle routing application (I don’t think it ever though of itself as a map viewer) it remains around and organic maps continues to have the editing feature, but with a vastly smaller user base.

https://github.com/simonpoole/ConditionalRestrictionParser has been available and in use for half a decade.

I wouldn’t suggest that it’s a ‘reference implementation’ as the tag itself is woefully under specified and many things about it are not well thought out.

There hasn’t been a long standing question about mapper bump in 2016 except for people that willfully ignore what is going on outside of their bubble, see @SimonPoole/diary/43093

But is there something similiar on the open source market?

The problem with financing free ponies is that somebody has to do it (finance them). Please feel free to organize that, not just I am waiting with baited breath.

See @SimonPoole/diary/34856

The user I mentioned there had waited just under 10 years, so yours is older, but I’m sure there a numerous older ones.

Themed mapping apps are IMHO the emperors new clothes of OSM. As a movement we want our contributors to be effective as possible when they are doing the most expensive activity we have, that is surveying outside. There is probably a role for them for groups that aren’t really interested in OSM, but that’s about it.

I was thinking of something like 1F16 see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Extended

@mmd I think most of these could easily be found (I’m sure we’ve got a lot of those in German language names too) because of the fixed mappings.

@bryceco given the small number of strings and that the community is likely small I wold agree that simply contacting the contributors in question with the list of problematic strings is the best idea.

@mmd I’m not convinced that mbsrtowcs does validation outside of ensuring that the input is well formed UTF-8, aka I don’t think it actually checks if the code points are assigned or not.

On the general issue: I’ve done some experimenting on input validation in Vespucci with regexps using unicode character classes and code blocks. That is validating that the input string is in the expected script and this seems to work reasonably well. Naturally you can really only output a warning and you need to allow emojis and so on, but it is probably better than nothing, for example you could warn if a name:mm tag contained non-Burmese characters and the same for name tag on an object located in Myanmar.

Isn’t it more correct to say that “OSM assumes that tags are encoded in valid UTF-8 but the API does not validate that this is actually the case”? This isn’t a surprise as validation of any kind outside of referential correctness has always been left to the editing apps.

My questions from a developer to the EWG would be, assuming that this will be a new requirement on editors

• is it reasonably possible to validate input strings against UTF-8
• is it reasonably possible to validate that input strings are using likely correct code points for the language/script in question?
• what libraries are available for the major programming languages that might support the above?

Obviously the use of characters not in the local script in names might throw a spanner in to validation (consider names with emojis in them), but maybe I’m missing something.

In general if the EWG considers this top priority then the 1st step should be to stop the bleeding, that is to add validation code to the editors so that the problem doesn’t get worse.

@Lejun your requirements conflict a bit with themselves, so I can’t tell if it is actually a solution that you would be happy with, in any case if your phone crashes again we should have a look at that. But maybe just using a camera app that gives you orientation in the exif data (for example Open Camera) would be the better solution (orientation makes it easier to determine what you were looking at).

PS: “, a customizable presets to one-tap buttons function could make themed mapping parties a breeze” You know that Vespucci has had preset based filters since ages? Giving you a themed editor with a couple of clicks.

@Lejun there is no particular reason Vespucci shouldn’t work with your device (rebooting is in any case an OS bug and has nothing to do with the app). You will be limited by the heap size to a small number of layers, but you probably wouldn’t want to overdue that in any case because of the device being quite slow. We regularly test releases on a 1GB device, and two devices with older Android versions than you are running and it runs just fine.

In tag-only mode there is no danger of deleting objects inadvertently (not that that would seem to be a real danger to start with), but you can still add new ones, alternatively you can simply filter out stuff you don’t want to be able to edit.

With a bit of added complexity you can get full offline editing, both OSM data and background layers, see https://vespucci.io/tutorials/offline/

Care to share what device (+ Android version) you are using?

I suspect you might want to pause this and get community input before you invest too much time.

I believe the general consensus right now is to -not- map body of waters with relations as practically unmaintainable.

@RicoElectro doesn’t the introduction to iD mention this? It is more or less clear from other messaging in iD but I wouldn’t expect that to register.

See https://vespucci.io/tutorials/vespucci_intents/ and https://vespucci.io/help/en/Node%20selected/#share-position