As I mentioned elsewhere, this accusation reads very much like a conspiracy theory (and a poorly-written one at that).

You’ve made a number of hand-wavy claims here, and have used language designed to be inflammatory (“removed … by a server intervention”, “Tile manufacturers are probably responsible for this”, “fake”, “mapping for the renderer”).

What you’ve omitted to say is what you think is what you think is actually wrong. Also I don’t see how a map style could possibly be guilty of “mapping for the renderer” - a map style is the renderer.

You’ve had a number of disagreements with the Austrian community (see https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-at/2020-December/thread.html#10905 et al). This claim just looks to be a continuation of that dispute - a disagreement with what other people think OSM is about.

One thing that you can’t accuse OSM’s “standard” map style of is being hidden. For example, the main “meadow” rendering rules are here. What I see when I zoom in and out of a meadow area is entirely consistent with what the code looks like it’s trying to do. You may not be a fan of that “way_pixels determine polygon-gamma” effect (I’m not), but you can’t accuse the renderer (or the tile server) of doing something different to the code.

Can you link to an actual OSM object that is handled inconsistently?

I’m not so sure about that…

Are you perhaps trying to enter a competition for the Plain English Campaign’s “Golden Bull Award”? Come on - “solutioning” - really! Even better, the links are to Google Docs files so many of the people that it’d be great to get feedback from simply won’t be able to read them.

If I was to make one suggestion it would be this:

HOT as an organisation should take more responsibility for users of platforms such as https://tasks.hotosm.org , and especially for ensuring that people posting projects there are educated about what they need to do, and if people fail to do what they should HOT should take action to ensure that (a) existing tasks are taken down ad they don’t create new tasks and (b) any problems with existing data are sorted out. With a DWG hat on I’m currently tidying up some of the mess left around the world by the company that Pete Masters talked about here. Unfortunately, poor-quality contributions where there isn’t a significant local OSM community won’t often be seen - the DWG are still getting reports in dribs and drabs as locals try and communicate with the problem mappers, nothing happens, and they come to us instead. In his reply, Pierre Béland summed up the sitation very well - this is not an isolated problem.

We (the DWG) were requested by HOT to delete everything that these contributors had added (in practice we’re only doing that where the quality is so bad that starting from scratch is less work than amending what’s there; but unfortunately that’s true in most cases). At a rough guess** I’d say 10-15% of these problem edits had been detected by other OSM users in the 15-20 or so days since these edits were made, suggesting that 85-90% were not.

Best Regards,

Andy, from the DWG

** difficult, because changeset sizes vary

I stumbled across this comment at HN today, allegedly from someone who works on OpenJDK.

(re JOSM on flash) - when I saw that I thought someone had managed to create a JVM that just depends on Macromedia/Adobe Flash (now developed by Harman, part of Samsung)!

Have you seen osm.wiki/OpenLevelUp ? For an example, see here.

I clicked on their accounts and it said it didn’t exist which was very strange.

That probably means that someone has already reported them for sending spam messages and they have already been deleted.

Are these OSM messages sent from within openstreetmap.org? If so, I’d suggest reporting the user via the “report” button.

If not, let us know how these messages are being sent and people will be able to offer further advice.

@IpswichMapper If someone had left information such as the above in a note then yes, I’d probably hide it as it’s likely that they didn’t realise that the note was public. However this diary entry was clearly intended to communicate with other users (it requested an action).

@KENDRA PHILLIPS In case you’re not aware, you can remove the contents of this diary entry by editing it. If you would like it to be hidden completely then just comment here asking for someone to do that. This assumes that you want to do that of course - you may be happy for it to stay, and if you are, that’s fine too.

Regards, Andy, from OSM’s Data Working Group

Looks like you’ve fixed it now…

We need support to do that, can we ask you to do it for us ?

Absolutely - I’m sure anyone who’s commented here would be deleted to help.

For the avoidance of doubt:

Above you have said “All I can say is when I go to Google Earth, it is next to impossible to not see the figures”. It is NOT OK to use Google Earth as a source. Google’s licence does not allow it. For more details see osm.wiki/w/index.php?title=FAQ&oldid=2107930#Why_don.27t_you_just_use_Google_Maps.2Fwhoever_for_your_data.3F .

Best Regards,

Andy Townsend, on behalf of OSM’s Data Working Group.

@stephan75 More than happy to do so, no idea such a thing existed. Whatever will they think of next - self hosting?

(to add to what Mateusz said above) you can see what the Community Index suggests for an area by looking at https://openstreetmap.community/ . I presume you’re seeing OSM-US’ Slack mentioned because you’re editing in the US. Depending on where in the world you are you might get a mailing list appearing first, or a Telegram channel, or something else. For me it suggests a pub meeting at the top of the list. OSMF can’t really dictate where local mappers choose to communicate (“yes - you can create a Facebook group, but don’t dare talk about maps in there!”) and it makes sense to me for iD et al to point to where other local mappers actually are.

Sometimes there will be separate groups that don’t cross over much (for example, the frequent posters of the “talk” mailing list and the OpenStreetMap Telegram group are mostly different people) and that’s OK; people are people, and don’t always fit into “organised” hierarchies.

Apparently Natural Earth has broken again, and OSM Carto has added a workaround to their script, so the net result is no change should be needed to these tutorials.

I have to say I’m somewhat puzzled by some of the suggestions in here. Just to take one example (email) the suggestion seems to be move away Google Workspace (which is what G Suite is now called) and to move to something hosted by someone else? I can think of several reasons to avoid relying on Google for email, but “FOSS” isn’t really one of them. If the purpose is to avoid relying on a third-party which may be blocked, how does using a different third party help? For completeness, and as I’m sure you’re aware (though others may not be), the OSMF already runs both Google-hosted and internally-hosted non-Google email infrastructure.

Whilst I understand what Richard’s saying above with regard to e.g. github and Google Docs, I do have more sympathy there. Imagine we had a board member from somewhere like Iran (and why not - there’s a large vibrant OSM community there). Anyone from anywhere on this list would have difficulties participating in anything if Google Docs access was assumed.

I suspect that you’re probably going to have to provide a bit more detail about what the problem is…

• Which OSM map are you talking about? One of the map layers visible at openstreetmap.org (and if so which one) or somewhere else?

• Is it a new problem? If so, when was it previously OK?

• What country in the world are you in?

• What device are you using to access OSM data?

The DWG gets lots of complaints from people about sites that incorporate some data from OSM, but are also based on something else. People misunderstanding Facebook properties’ maps are the largest proportion by far, but most major re-users of OSM data appear somewhere on the list.

Depending on the nature of the complaint they might crop up in DWG reports as “misdirected”, “international” or “3rd party complaint”.

@cRaIgalLAn > I noticed that the comment referred to was perhaps angry and raised a threat

Presumably the threat you refer to is “if you violated the rules, you will be banned from editing”? Are you seriously suggesting that people who violated the rules should (if all else fails) not be banned from editing?

we choose to be nice to newbies without any exceptions

You’re correct that we do try and help people understand what OSM is and how OSM works. We (the DWG) get lots of requests along the lines of “your website does not show my country’s claimed boundaries” (when those claimed boundaries don’t match the reality on the ground). We get lots of accusations of “being on the side of the other side” in border disputes (often by both sides).

However, an account that has signed up purely to create two political diary entries and (despite the encouragement above) hasn’t done any OSM mapping probably isn’t here to improve the quality of OSM in China or elsewhere. We certainly ought to give everyone the benefit of the doubt (hence my reply above) but sometimes it is necessary to be direct as well.

For anyone unaware of the background here, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-55851052 et al. You could certainly argue that the statement by Wu Qian reported there “constitutes a threat”.

Various stone types, including Ogham stones, are now shown on this map. I can have a go at adding some of the other archaeological site types etc. as well.