OpenStreetMap
The amount of data on OSM sometimes boggles the mind, there was 23471 new changesets just yesterday. With so much great mapping work being done by the community, there’s always a possibility of a few bad apples. So, here’s a collection of a few that I have stumbled across last week (13 - 17 June).
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This changeset in which a number of
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=footway & https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:footway=crossing & https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:crossing=zebratags were deleted and nodes on highways withhttps://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=crossingtags were added in downtown Atlanta. It is to be remembered that both these methods are suggested in the OSM wiki for mapping crosswalks. -
This changeset deleted roads in Ethiopia using iD editor. Also 5 harmful changesets from 2 other users from whom one was deleting buildings and the other was editing features without any reference imagery or mentioned source.
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This changeset gave non-latin names in
nametag in London and this was reverted. -
In this changeset, nodes had attributes meant for the ways.
- This changeset fixes a user changing
trunkroad toprimaryroad tag. - These 3 changesets 1, 2,3 were reverted because they looked like this.
Stumbled on anything suspicous on the map this week? Do drop the mapper a message, for all you know, it was just an honest mistake :) Look forward to another roundup next week.
Discussion
Comment from jonwit on 21 June 2016 at 17:58
I feel some hatred towards central place theory hexagonal hinterlands.
Comment from Piskvor on 21 June 2016 at 20:21
Is that Settlers of Catan? ;) But what I wanted to mention is something else: since maps.me have introduced editing from inside their app (two months back?), I’ve seen - in my area of interest - multiple edits adding Chinese equivalents to local names, or people adding personal notes there.
I’m thinking this might be a localisation/user education problem: multiple people seem to have come to the conclusion that maps.me (and by extension, OSM) is the correct place to put their subjective notes (e.g. “my house”); it’s always the “name” tag, the change text is always Chinese. and created_by is always a recent version of maps.me. I don’t have enough data yet to infer more, but it’s disconcerting that others see a similar pattern elsewhere.