In this post we are excited to share some of our recent research into organized editing on OSM. This relatively new line of research has been motivated by two observations. The OSM community has seen a dramatic rise in organized editing over the last several years. This new presence has continued the historic debate on the role organized editing should play in OSM. We became interested to study how the editing habits of these new actors differed from the community as a whole, but were surprised by the lack of accessible data. We decided to use the public tools to create computational methods of understanding different editing behaviours to classify editors as being part of the organized group or volunteer.

Following is an attempt to share some of our initial results. We’ll begin by outlining a new method we created on classifying users based on their profiles. Then we’ll share some features we extracted that may affect whether a user is organized or volunteer. Finally, we’ll show initial prediction results.

Extracting a list of users

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