Than ks Warin61. At least someone that sees that this is a serious problem for sustainable development of OSM. Otherwise we would have to severely limit our objectives and many OSM projects would have to be abandonned, and possibly lot of data would have to be simply erased because becoming obsolete and unmaintainable in many development countries.

There’s already been several signs of this before, including with the partial retreat of Mapbox (building its own proprietary infrastructure on top the OSM base layer) and other providers stopping to grant us access to their sources.

It’s the whole credibility of OSM that becomes in danger (and a new possibility for Google or major commercial providers for once again increasing its presence, its prices, and its right to limit/filter data as they want).

We need a common CDN for sharing all granted imageries. And implement a repository of sources that can scale better for the many new goals we have developed.

Otherwise OSM will no longer be open to any contributors but will only be usable by import bots maintained by a few, still using opendata, but without review and we’ll become under influence of only governmental efforts (or lack of).

Of course caching helps. Notably for the issue above which was clearly related to a large Mapathon event in Indonesia, and not related to misuses by individual users (unless demonstrated, but Maxar does not detail the cause publicly, and may be already discussing about the iccue privately with OSM application maintainers or the OSM Foundation to avoid disclosing personal data publicly).

OAuth may eventually help against a few OSM users but this can already be tracked by OSM subscriptions and accounts, as msot of this usage seems related to active edits, that OSM servers may already track back to the same IP sources as those detected by Maxar of their imagery server (we cannot compare these usage logs, both are protected for good privacy reasons).

Maintaining an imagery source normally jsut requires creating a good caching proxy (or several ones). And OSM itself has its own tiles usage policy for the same purpose on its own tile servers, meant to be used by contributors and not by third party sites that should create their own cache for their web services (they are not all required to create map rendering servers).

Clearly this is noit a question of copyright, licence or authentication and prior authorization, but about usage policy. What the above discussion demonstrates is that Maxar provided good imagery sources for us, and they did not anticipate the success. Instead of blockiong everything, they should have implented some quota checks and reasonnable delays for delivering updated images, and should have asked the community for help to mirror their content on additional proxies.

This is a serious issue that we we should consider because we really need these imagery sources to work with, and such event may be something breaking any tentative applications for granting us more imagery data. We should come with a solution based on a generic CDN that could mirror all the imagery we want to use. And many OSM participating organizations can help for that or can provide additional means to create it, by motivating their own users to donate or help maintaining such CDN. For now only the base OSM rendered tiles map has a CDN. This should continue for other imageries. And we could say to providers that we can mirror this to help reduce the storage/bandwidth.

As well the usage policy can be enforced a bit more in OSM editors (iD or JOSM mainly) using better caching strategies, but many users don’t necessarily contribute with a device with high storage capabilities (notably for mobile devices which are the most widely used in developing countries for which Maxar currently provides some of the best imagery data).

So the huge spike seen by Maxar was in Indonesia, this may be related to a recent large mapathon that occured there (see the recent OSM Newsletters that speaks about it, but not the fact it blocked Maxar now for all OSM contributors).

OSM Indonesia should really try to negotiate a safer hosting solution for the imagery, or should ask for help from the community to find this.

It’s true that Digital Globe imagery is extremely useful for many developing countries and most HOT projects.

I think that multiple OSM-related organizations could discuss about implementing a large CDN for caching and delivering imagery tiles (Maxar could also participate itself to a part of the CDN on its own caching servers, and the OSM Foundation or HOT could work on coordinating them, using dynamic DNS to distribute and monitor the work load of participating servers). Other participants that have servers/storage/bandwidth capacities could help (e.g. the Wikimedia Foundation, OSM Germany, OSM France, and their own sponsors).

May be this is related to a recent Mapathon (announced after fact) in South East Asia. If this is the cause, such events should have been prepared by making sure the imageries proposed were cached.

I suggest that large mapthon events instruct their participants to use a local caching proxy for their web configuration, rather than a direct Internet access.

Small mapathons may not need that, but large mapathons organized online should negaciate their imagery source with a dedicated proxy (at least for the time of the main event, such instruction may be removed later to use usual imagery).

If this is caused by some HOT project, HOT project admins should corectly configure their projet and monitor the activity on the HOT tasks before removing the specifically proxied imagery source.

Probably if Maxar can’t support the increase of usage on its own servers a caching server hosted by OSM-supporting sponsors will act to relay the usage while enforcing a low usage on the Maxar’s resources.

I hope that this will not avoid the access to Maxar’s resources for specific areas in emergency (e.g. for HOT projects for a limited time, until these resources are cached by OSM for longer term usage, e.g. when improving or correcting some areas or checking at the history, which can occur for years but in spreaded areas but at much lower frequency).

We should alreayd have an infrastructure allowing to host multiple caches for backup/recovery and permanence of the service, while limiting the direct interaction between tens of thousands of users over very large areas at all scales (notably for images in high resolution, which can easily escape the capacity of caches). The cache servers we need for OSM need to have large caching capacity and long refresh time, and should be compliant with “modern” HTTP/1.1 requests (“If-modified-since:” headers or similar) that can save a lot of bandwidth, and possibly should support modern compression algorithm and modern transport layers (e.g. HTTP2, i.e. the Google’s prototol), including streaming and queued requests on the same shared socket, while also preserving the necessary metadata (notably those for copyright and attribution, and notices for the usage policy).

If there were abusive uses recently, may be this can be traced to specific clients not complying to the rules or having implementation bugs. If not, we could trace back to the users refusing to endorse the tile usage policy, or could come from users using small devices with insufficient local storage, or users trying to use some advanced tools (not normal browsers) like Wget to perform automated queries bypassing all caches with a high frequency of requests: systermatically refusing to honor the caching date limits should be considered an abuse (note: users may want to clear their caches occasionnally.

Studying the serverside logs to identify the sources of these “abusive” requests should be interesting. If there are bugs in some of our applications for some situations (e.g. for users conencted via some proxies), users should be informed and there should be a way to notify them that their local proxy does not comply the rules, and that they should select a more appropriate proxy or compliant VPN if possible.

This may be a problem for users in some countries that cannot escape the mandatory proxy set to them by their ISP and government: for these users, we should have a solution to propose to them, by proposing them to apply for an account on a compliant proxy we can support (such usage should ne nominative, and should have its own policy : for personal use only, and only for use in an OSM editor, not for use in any web site or dedicated mobile application

(e.g. for a merchant site: merchants should have to implement their own caches for their own users, and ensure their storage has a cumfortable size and long enough conservation respecting the caching time limits for at least 85% of requests or better; and they should have monitoring statistics for the efficiency of their cache, i.e. hits/misses vs. requests and some history of these statistics to detect possible caveats and ensure correct and rapid adaptation of their own policies, or allowing their operators to consider increasing their storage and possibly update/fix their proxy softwares, firewalls, routings and so on.).

I hope that Maxar’s decision was not based on very temporary spikes that may have been caused by some recent updates in client softwares or changes in protocols (e.g. a major update in some popular web browser like Chrome, Firefox or Safari causing this temporary caveat for many users over a short time, or a major update of the OS enforcing the reinstallation of the browser and clearing of its local cache; normally major OS updates are scheduled in the world over a period of a few days so that not too many people will upgrade to the same time, causing major usage spikes also on OS-provider’s sites, and there should be a large tolerance for updates needed so that not all updates need to be made to continue a service, even if it’s not the best tuned for future uses, and users should have a resonnably long delay to upgrade, except for very serious security issues that should be fixed by strictly minimal changes on updated systems)

I’ve seen the case of disjunct but close patches used in the same multipolygon coming from the progressive improvement of surrounding smaller polygons to detach them from an old larger but less detailed polygon. As the polygon is very large, it’s hard to redraw it completely from scratch without breaking it and creating large holes. And especially with iD, this can happen any time and is hard to see when it occurs. Only JOSM users will notice that these multipolygons can be separated, but it requires reapplying the tags of the multipolygon down to the components. before they can be removed as “outer” members of the multipolygon. If all patches have been separated and there remains no members, then only the now empty multipolygon can be removed. But it will be oftren recreated if one component is still large and still needs improving. So basically only small patches are removed and separated, and large multipolygons remain even if there is still only one member in it, because it this member way will continue to be split again to detail it further.

So I’m not surprised to see that there remains multipolygons with only one member, this is a minor problem and not a real issue, but the sign that further work needs to be done (and is sometime pending) to detail the content, but this is not done immediately because mappers frequently have long list of things to do and intermediate steps are necessary: trying to do everything at once creates a case where “todo lists” tend to explode exponentially, never ending for an initial modification that was intended to be much more local and not with a so huge impact that it had to process recursively all the touching polygons covering a larger and larger area…

” Telling a professional political scientist”: clearly your job is biased and oriented. That’s why I have doubts notably when you write that have contacts mostly with local authorities. Givben your position (and the stated public position of Trump that has erased all efforts in US for real research, and hist public intent of “America first”, I doubt his admisnitration will continue financing your project in your job if it’s not politically oriented, in a country which is surrounded by other major powers, i.e. Russia, Russia and China, but which is culturally linked to Turkey. I don’t criticize your jib: you do the best you can in your position, but your official position certainly causes severe limitations about what you can do and with whom you’ll get local contacts. It an only be turned to be biased in favor of existing local governement, rather than the local community: it is one important view, but not the only one.

So you have contacts also with independant NGOs? Can they run their own projects without prior authorization by Turkemen authorities (and indirectly you with the budget that Trump’s administration allows you to delegate to your mission) ?

And sorry, but your prior publication before starting the wiki was not advertized on the wiki, you did not present your self or explain the mission and the limitations that your official position forces you to adopt.

That’s why I ask the community to take what you provide (even if it’s, maybe, useful) with other views (including from the diaspora leaving now abroad). Turkmenistan is a country with severe political and interethnic problems and taking a position in favor of just the current giovernement may be dangerous to accept de facto in OSM: it will clearly forget much of what Turkmen people expect to see (and will never see because their governement will not provide it).

Now you feel it like an insult. It isi not, just a fact that you must admit: your job is OK but oriented and not sufficient. And OSM still lacks independant involvement in the country, notably by having non governmental NGOs (including international ones) to follow their own targets and preent other views: there’s so muc hto do to map this country, even for the most basic needs that their governmetn does not provide, or does not want to do (and will not allow you to do for them as well) ! And you won’t risk a diplomatic incident by bypassing their direct supervision of what you do (as this could turn the Turkmen government to go with help from Russia, China or Iran, or even Turkey).

It is my opinion that what you do has other commercial targets, such as controling gas and oil exports from Russia or Iran, and it is the only reason why Trump’s administration has accepted to support your current work. I see little things that you have made for now which targets the preservation of environment (not a goal for Trump), or the development for the local population (“America First” for Trump), or local democracy.

So accept that your work is biased (this is your official position). Or explain to the community how your work can continue independantly with personal implication (even if you take the risk of having your current job position cancelled or your project having is working budget cancelled, like what Trump has done repeatedly, he constantly changes his views and has taken various decisions without hearing enyone of his own advertizers, and has irritated even his own strongest supporters and many allies). You’re not in a very cumfortable position, and NGOs are probably more neutral and more stable, and you’d probably work better within one of them if you like this country where you live now and have good personal relations with some of their local communities.

there was NO insulting words above. But it’s a shame that there was no presentation at all before you asked to block someone that was honestly helping you as you have explicitly asked for on that wiki ! You never discuss with anyone, sent two messages, did not reply to my own, and I was blocked while I was doing nothing that day. I had no contact from any one else ! In summary you just started alone, and you had problems I wanted to fix, you did not understand that, and made false assumptions about my intent. It’s a fact I have collaborated with a lot of people and helped many users in the wiki, because I still see that you don’t know how to edit it properly and you are not trained at all about its existing limitations and how it has slowly evolved to be usable by more people (even if there are still problems, many of them were not solved at all by admins when I contacted them since years !). You were new to that project, I was not. You did not consider anything in my history and in fact it’s jsut new that now you want to discuss what you do… but with others. But too late ! My blocking was compeltely unfair for false reasons. And the current documetned Wiki etiquette and procedures was not respected at all.

You state that I have not read and understood what you wrote. Even though I respected what you did, I diud not contradict what you wrote (besinde the fact it was confusing, I wanted to disambiguate them, by looking at other sources).

You contacted me only because I have corrected a template at top of page where you had used incorrectted parameters, and used inconsistant naming conventions, with variuous broekn links and categories.

Even if you think I was wrong, I kept all what you wrote: you had a disagreement about the fact that I had used “region” to designate a city which is not just a city but also a primary division of the country (the other types of primary divisions have another Turkmen name which is confusiong as they are not all primary divisions).

So I had correctly categorized that city BOTH as a city AND a region.

Then I started to split the confusing description table to exhibit how each of your described unit could be structured and subdivided, depedning on their parent type. I did not break your description.

Then you contacted me in emergency while I was trying to help you, and I replied to you.

Instead of replying to me you did not engage eny discussion, and contacted an offline channel secretetely. Then I was blocked by people that ignored the ongoing discussion completely, and who did not even participate to your project, and decided to block me permanently with false reason (no desire to work with community: this is exactly the opposite that I did since long: when I have doubts about confusing things in the wiki, I still don’t modify it, or I discuss them with really lot of people: I’m fully part of the comunity to which I have given serious help since years.

As I have made a lot of things on the wiki to improve its navigation since years (where wiki admins were constantly absent or ignoring the messages that were targeted to them), I had many think you, and still people asking me to help them fix their job: most of the fixes on the wiki were extremely minimal, but made the wiki usable in all languages, structured as the people initially wanted to do it, respecting all the former usages, collecting tons of pages in dead end to allow them to be found and finally maintainned again by their authors or other people discovering them more easily and immediately.

There are lot of problems on the iwki du to lack of maintenance and lack of documentation. But also because people forget to post at least links to their ongoing projects they have documetned elsewhere: it’s really hard to connect people because work is done majoritarily on OSM by autonomous communities doing what they want without taking care of what others do in the same areas or topic: so necessarily, when one touches something done by someone else, there are some levels of frictions: these are solved by documenting each other work, and finding ways to merge them or make them compatible. This is all what I did.

I was blocked unfairly by people that were not involved in your project, and that did not even know you before (you were not even presented on your wiki os OSM page). You were new to this wiki, and made the common errors that all newcomers do initially: I only wanted to help you, and I was absolutely not closed to disussions with you.

I had even taken your remark into account, by switching one city page to use “city” as the primary type, but still keeping “region” as the secondary type by inverting the two categories. I was still reverted agressively. The revert also restored the various minor quirks that were remaining. I had started the work to organize the pages by region (not everything can go to a single category for the whole country).

Beside the other edits that were also reverted agressively was the structuring of your page by logicial topic: it was only reordering sections, not deleting anything.

You criticize the format of the table I tried to do to help map the official divisions to OSM entities and groups. It was still a start to disambiguate things and make things clearer. Now you admit it is still very confusive. But I did not change what you meant.

My permanent blocking is largely excessive, and while I could have accepted a temporary block (until we find a way to discuss and organize things), now it blocks all the other projects that I have maintained and discussed with tons of people. And the maintenance of the wiki (that no wiki admin took in charge for years) is once again degrading,with people making incompatible edits, broken links, and so on.

I need to be able to discuss with people, at least alert them. Now it’s impossible. My situation is now worse than what has been done against obvious spammers, which I am not (I have also helped since long to avoid massive sabotages by abusers).

It’s strange because I only wanted to help you and support your project. But you did not really join the community the way it was working. Still you benefit (like amny others) of what I have done since years on this wiki, which I made compeltely international, and that I consistantly helped to reduce its maintenance cost and its performance. Some templetes were patiently done to do that, I documented many of them (including those left undocumented by many oither authors, and then used inconsistantly or producing unexpected results).

It’s a shaming situation. For what was only a minor problem : a lack of mutual understanding of our intents, and incorrect assumptions by you that I had would have not read or understood what you did. I have never disputed the fact that the capital city of the country was a “city”: it was clear for me from the begining and I had absolutely not changed that. But it was not just that: lot of other coutrnies have capital cities with special status at primary level: you could have looked at them as examples: the term “city” in the wiki (and in OSM) is not meant to be understood as administrative: OSM uses another classification for that based on boundary=adminsitrative plus admin_level. I had also checked the content of Wikipedia and Wikidata about that country (maintained since by a larger community than OSM, including governemental users), and checked various existing standards.

I just used the existing common practices adopted since long everywhere else on the wiki. You may criticize it, but most of these were not created by me, and theses conventions have a large number of users, so I cannot change that just to please one user working isolately in a single country, where there’s eveidently lot of work to do (and I thank you for taking some lead to start it and provide some data, but it still needs to be organized and structured along with the rest so that data gets also usable more internationally and we get a reasonnably integrated map where no details is forgotten). It’s a long task. Changes cannot be done radically and before continuing a work it’s important to structure it using the existing common conventions, even if we can also start discussing them to see how to change them (and I know it will not be easy because there will be tons of users and projects involved or concerned directly by such change).

However as an amabassador his role would be to negaciate and find contacts. I’ve experimetned the fact that he wants to work strictly alone, contacting only a few OSM admins to get their trust, without really presenting himself correctly or taking any contact or discussion with existing contributors, starting to do everything from scratch. So he should better help into providing data and negociating authorizations with local auhorities to get their data, help with some translations (from his paid crew team of translators), propose imagery sources…

So now we know that apm-wa is NOT a local contributor in Turkmenistan, and uses his own American “knowledge” of view of the country and acts there as a Trump-nominated puppet. I’m very curious about the fact that there’s no consultation at all in fact with Turkmen people and even their diaspora of users abroad. We know also that he also does not fairly understand the effective administrative structure of that country, and is unable to organize his own collected ideas into something really understandable. Well he could be useful to find local contacts, but should not be left working alone ! I’m not sure that Turkmen people will even recognize their own country.

No, the “Belgian” mailing list is not the correct place to summarize, just like any one of the many mailing lists that OSM has because no one will ever subscribe to all of them or would have to support many mlessages in a language they can’t read or write.

Even the English (only) general OSM mailing list is the bad place : it excludes many users from discussing.

The OSM forum also is not suitable (and in fact it is closed by a few users appying their own local policies they have enforced without any discussion).

Only one place allows summarizing : the wiki, it is really international and allows linking to all relevant places (mailing lists, blogs…) where things are published. And where things can be reviewed later at any time by anyone (without also having to constantly monitor everything as they happen: it can be reached and discovered later, it is archived).

But it does not mean that every thing must be hosted on the wiki, it is just a central repository to post the links and summaries, and inform others when things are occuring somewhere (people need to be informed that a decision is taking place somewhere, but unfortunately most important decisions are taken that have long term impact and on more people than those that were connected to the specific channel, without informing anyone outside, and then it’s taken as “decided”, even if few people participated. It also excludes any newcomer from having their own view, and does not allow reviewing the past “decisions”).

For this reason, the wiki should be mor eprecisely managed and structured. However most people don’t care about linking and categorizing what they post there. And many OSMers think it is not important to do that: I disagree, without the wiki the OSM community would not exist at all internationaly, and OSM would not be an international project, and we would not even have the various tools we have now to structure the data and audit its quality. It is the essential part of OSM: documenting what is existing now, what will happen, what may change, problems encountered, solutions proposed, solutions abandonned (yes this happens but too rarely), and policies (where they can be also reviewed later to improve or remove them when needed).

Email is NOT too old, they are easily manageable and sortable like people want (not the case with forums). They are archivable unlike IRC which is lost: any decision or talk in IRC is immediately lost and IRC should never be used for discussing issues prior to deciding something. Forums are nightmares to navigate and search and their content is deleted/moved without notice. However we also have too many lists and users cannot track all of them and will not want to subscribe all of them. Additionally some miling lists are targetting specific languages and are very geographically centered, meaning that they will not be accessible to many users that can’t participate to the decisions. There are different ways to communicate but at least the wiki is the central point to collect the result and inform other people of what is going on in specific communication channels: all important discussions and decisions should be documented and summarized on the wiki even if it is just to include an URL to some publicly readable archive, website, or blog.

All past decisions must be motivated with a track of talks and votes that occured (which most of the time involved only a few users, and not the general community at large) and with ways to know who to contact again: all past decisions will need to be reviewed later by others having different opinions or new needs or problems to solve that were ignored in the past decision.

I personnally consider that ANY decision made in a specific communication channel and which was not publicly announced and tracked on the wiki as INVALID, and UNJUSTIFIED: this decision only affects the effective participants of these specific channels (and only at the time they used it: IRC for example is an extremely bad channel for collective decision process because we cannot ask to everyone in the OSM community to be online there 24/24-7-7 to follow what happens).

The same is true about social networks (notably Facebook, Twitter) because they are inundated by floods of unrelated posts or reposts from various pages and it’s simply impossible to follow everything that happened there (and notably months or years ago). These are “junk” channels, almost immediately forgotten.

If every community was correctly communicating, it would document the channels they use on their local wiki page. And would report there also pointers to important transcripts, and talks that happened. Otherwise it’s not possible to track all the various channels that are used. And what was an early consensus would probably no logner be the case with current users (also users should know that they are not mapping for them alone, in their own local place, and users will be interested from around the world, and will want to use the data un unexpected ways: this is the goal of OSM to open the data to more people, wherever they are, and whatever language they use). The communication channels are changeable at any time, but no decision made locally in these channels should be considered valid if they are not centralized and summarized in a central place where they can be found… and later contested to create something better and more reusable in more contexts than those initially considered.

Je sais très bien que UMap peut lire les requêtes Overpass, ce n’est pas la question. Ici je commentais le fait que “extent”:[x1,y1,x2,y2] ne correspond à rien dans UMap, c’est une bounding box, pas une géométrie représentable. UMap détermine lui même les bounding box pour déterminer un niveau de zoom par défaut. Mais il ne sait pas quoi faire d’une propriété qui ne serait pas une “string” en valeur ou une valeur numérique : y mettre un tableau (JSON) ne donne rien, la propriété est ignorée et OSM ne permet pas de coder des tableaux de données en valeurs, et si on y met du JSON, ce sera une “string” (limitée à 255 caractères) et ce n’est pas une valeur d’attribut OSM standard. Note que par Overpass on n’obtiendra que les attributs des objets codés dans les “properties” d’un objet “Feature” geoJSON. Overpass cependant peut aussi retourner des données en format OSM-JSON qui n’est PAS le geoJSON (format très différent notamment pour les relations inexistantes en geoJSON, et la représentation des surfaces, geoJSON ne décomposant pas les ways et surfaces pour leur associer les noeuds membres et n’identifiant pas les noeuds fusionnés, les géométries GeoJSON sont totalement autonomes et reliées à rien d’autre que le “Feature” qui inclue chaque géométrie)

La conversion en CSV n’est pas nécessaire pour uMap qui peut lire les GeoJSON directement avec les propriétés incluses dans chaque “Feature” importé dans la collection “FeatureCollection”.

Dans uMap tu trouves ces propriétés directement dans les champs “avancés”, sous lors forme “type”:”valeur”. Cependant “extent”:[x1,y1,x2,y2] n’est pas utilisable directement. Et il te permet d’utiliser ces champs de propriété aussi dans la mise en forme de la description. Tu peux aussi utiliser un ou plusieurs des champs pour le tri automatique. Le JSON peut être téléchargé directement depuis son producteur avec l’URL de sa requête sans avoir à l’importer dans uMap. uMap sait aussi utiliser la “geometry” indiquée dans un des types supportés : “Node”, “LineString” pour une courbe continue / ou “MultiLineString” pour les courbes discontinues ou maillées, “Polygon” pour une surface délimitée par un contour externe (éventuellement avec des trous délimités aussi par des contour fermés), ou “MultiPolygon” pour plusieurs surfaces disjointes (chacune avec ou sans trous).

I also agree that nothing forbids Google supporting out project by giving money, but it won’t be for a commercial contract wiht exclusive rights. It will be like other donations, only because Google supports out common project, but it won’t take more advantage than other OSM contributors.

As well Google may join the OSM foundation, like any other members, if it agrees with the existing membership status and terms.

Google can also help us develop applications, or can also contribute by offering hardware servers, or hosting (with a long enough contract warrantied for at least a couple of years, and renewed at least one year in advance).

Google also has the right to use our data, provided it gives correct attribution. Google can also develop its own renderer (but will have problkems if its renderer mixes our open data with the proprietary data protected by Google or by tits contractual providers;

What is said here about Google remains equally true for Apple, Microsoft/Bing/Yahoo, Facebook, or other large non-US companies like Vodafone, Orange or any foreign government, or any NGO…

Also true for Baidu and other P.R.Chinese (the problem with Baidu is about geographic data in P.R. China itself, except Hong Kong/Macau/Taiwan, where accurate WGS84 data is legally forbidden and has to be replaced by the Chinese proprietary “devil’s transform” when GPS/WGS84 coordinates are transformed using non-linear equations that are not easily reversible… But Baidu has a separate service in mainland China and elsewhere, just like most other international companies selling cartographic services and GPS devices (also modified in China to use crypotographically modified coordinates, that are not completley interoperable with the rest of the world).

Note that the conversion from GPS/WGS84 to the Chinese projection is extremely easy (so worldwide maps can be easily produced in the Chinese projection, but the reverse is not so easy (and legally forbidden) to produce accurate maps of China in our common WGS84 projection or other international cartographic or geodesic transforms. But this transform is not unique: different Chinese providers generate different pseudo-randomized coordinates and it seems that the Chinese “devil’s transform” includes specific parameters for authorized sellers of solutions, so these Chinese transforms are not interoperable and form a set of multiple closed proprietary systems (where also the Chinese government authorization includes an exclusive rights for Chiense authorities to force the solution providers to alter or remove any data that Chinese authorities don’t like in the data made legally available on mainland China.

So in OSM we have no way to generate accurate map, we can only produce approximations and we cannot get legal support from local Chinese contributors (including foreign people visiting China which can be jailed or fined by Chinese courts, or ejected manu-military from the country). This does not concern only Chinese companies but even Apple, Google, Microsoft and others have accepted to follow the Chinese rules in the services they offer in mainlnad China, which are necessarily diferent from those in the rest of the world: we cannot accept theese rules in OSM because we cannot given primary provileges to the Chinese government over the rest of the worldwide OSM community. As well we cannot accept that OSM would get the (costly) licence for using the “devil’s” transform required by Chinese authorities.

This does not mean that we cannot map China, but that the precision of data we can bring in OSM for that territory will remain severaly limited (with exact locations unknown with errors ranging up to 700 meters away and no way to synchronnize them with different contributors)

If we want to provide a map for Chinese users, this cannot be done with a local OSM chapter in Hong Kong/Macau/Taiwan, but we would need a specific “chapter” in Beijing/Shangai to support and generate a derived database using the Chinese transform, but that database will be constantly subject ot alterations and removals by Chinese authorities and we won’t be able to reuse these derived data, so that chapter would not conform to our rules. It’s simply impossible to accept such chapter (we can only accept chapters in HongKong/Macau/Taiwan working with international standard projections for correctly mapping their local territory, but not mainland China).

Reverting/deleting an newly added water pond which is clearly existing on the imagery (when your comment above and in the reverting changeset) says the opposite, is not the correct way to do.

I don’t know how you can check that remotely or which kind of imagery you used to revert these additions: the added ponds are present in SEVERAL imagery sources and they also match with terrain elevation data and surrounding water drains.

Many rural roads don’t have any assigned name (may be they are colloquially named in one area by saying “road of City-X” or “road of City-Y” but the choice of the city has no formal agreement. In addition this name will vary depending on the direction (even if this is a bidirectional road without separation), depending from where you start.

Instead, these roads have a national or regional numeric reference (this is the case in France where NoName ‘'’incorrectly’’’ signals “no name” despite this is definitely not an error.

Sometimes they may have informal names, used for commercial purpose (e.g. “route du vin”, “route du meuble”) or hultural and historical names (e.g. “route de la liberté”, which very frequently colloquially references a long series of distinct roads with distinct statuses) and it is not consistant and NOT used in addresses (which will instead use names of localities (e.g. for hamlets), and more rarely the numeric reference.

You should not signal roads that have a correct “ref”=* (e.g. ref=”D 637” in France): the reference is really enough (the directions that appear on road indicators indicate various distant cities according to the direction, NOT the name of the road, but they consistantly display the national/regional/local classification, depending on the local collectivities that manage it, as a letter and the numeric reference).

In France, we use Osmose, which already does a pretty good job in detecting roads missing references (and or streets in cities), and which perform many additional checks that your tool do not perform.

So most of the red colors that appear in France are completely wrong: they do not indicate a low level of advancement. I think this is also the case in most countries of Europe : we should NEVER add in OSM “fancy” road names (or descriptive names), just to avoid your “red” colors you assign to them. (If you need to add a descriptive name just tag “description=”, NOT “name=” !!!

Potlatch, qui utilise abondamment Javascript dans le navigateur, ne peut gérer autant de données que JOSM. Les modifications apportées doivent être sauvées souvent car il ne peut pas charger une quantité importante de tuiles, et par défaut tente de charger tous les noeuds, tous les chemins et polygones, et toutes les propriétés. Rapidement c'est le navigateur qui refuse d'aller plus loin en limitant la mémoire.
Avec Potlatch, on ne peut éditer des zones aussi étendues qu'avec JOSM.
JOSM est un peu plus difficile au départ à utiliser que Potlatch, mais son installation est ultrasimple (il faut toutefois avoir d'abord installé le runtime Java d'Oracle, puis télécharger un petit fichier pour JavaWebStart, dont on peut créer un raccourci sur le bureau. Un cic sur l'icone et ils se lance en téléchargeant automatiquement la dernière mise à jour.
JOSM permet aussi de faire des modifications plus compliquées qu'on n'arrive pas à faire aussi bien sur Potlatch, notamment grace au support de calques permettant de sous-sélectionner des ensembles plus réduits de données, et de choisir son modèle de fond de carte (imagerie) et de rendu. Il permet aussi des recherches, divers tests de cohérence pour la validation des données (les oublis sont faciles avec des noeuds vierges posés en trop), il peut aussi télécharger des verions historiques (utile en cas de catastrophe), ou d'essayer une modification longue dans un calque, de sauvegarder localement son travail en court, et de pouvoir travailler sur des jeux de données ou sous-cartes différentsn en parallèle, avant de les fusionner dans un calque courant qu'on peut alors valider, tout en laissant le reste à plus tard. C'est partique pour procéder par étapes, et ne rien perdre, sans casser trop la cartographie modifiée postée en ligne. Il permet aussi de ne pas envoyer les modifs tout de suite (CTRL+S pour sauvegarder le calque courant dans on fichier .os. JOSM a aussi un cache plus efficace et plus économique et rapide que Potlatch.
J'aiutilisé Jotlatch pour débuter de toutes petites modifications locales (déplacer un noeud, une voie, ou corriger un bâtiment et les croisements de routes et la signalisation, ou encore poser des POIs pour commerces/cafés/services publics....