I have reverted the name changes made by these users. In many cases the names have now reverted to names that you have added yourself, and you have often chosen all-caps naming ("WARRI CITY TRAINING GROUND" or so). Please don't use all-caps names. "Warri City Training Ground" is sufficient.

This is not about how I feel but about OSM's public standing: Are we the map that represents truth on the ground, or are we the map that represents wishful thinking of rabid mountainbikers. I prefer the former.

In this changeset you have changed the "Sweet Pea" trail, which is closed to the public as recorded by me in a previous changeset, from "access=no" to "foot=no" and "horse=no", thereby erroneously marking it as ok to use for cyclists. Combined with the misleading changeset description of "alignment" this has a distinctive smell of mountain bike vandalism. I am not local but I have been told by a local park ranger that the path is closed and signs are posted to that effect. If you want to record this path as open to cyclists, please provide supporting evidence. "I want to ride there" is not sufficient reason to mark something as allowed for cycling.

Mark, just to be very clear on this - copyright tops the potential of saving lives for first responders or any other laudable use case you can find. If it comes from Royal Mail, it does not go into OSM full stop, no matter how useful for a first responder or anyone else. We don't copy it, we don't "triangulate", we don't use it at all. We haven't invented these rules but we are going to play by them. Even if it is a data source that *could*, given a mobile phone signal, be used freely in some other app or on some web site - still not something we may add to OSM. And regarding "that form of words", we are not about words, we're about data. If there is any name you have added that does not come from a sign or an out-of-copyright map but instead from a copyrighted source, then you must remove that name again. When push comes to shove, we at OSM must be able to demonstrate that we haven't illegally copied the data, and "I've talked to the locals" may work for a handful of names but becomes strained when it is used as an explanation for hundreds. So please, again, have a think about any data you may have been added from copyrighted sources not only today, but over your course of contributing to OSM, and remove all of it. Please do take this seriously because if doubts remain, OSM must err on the side of caution rather than risk violating copyright.

oops, I meant to write "Royal Mail" not "Royal Maps".

Dear Mark, sadly all but one of the sources you mentioned are protected by copyright. You cannot use any Royal Maps product, OSG, the Orkney Islands Concil listings or the current OS maps to contribute anything to OpenStreetMap, and anything you have derived from these data sources must be removed again or else OpenStreetMap could be liable to copyright violation claims.

Historic NLS maps are ok to use, and of course personal knowledge and own observations are fine. But anything copied from these other sources must not remain in OSM.

Will you be able to unpick your past contributions and remove what is not allowed for us to have? If you cannot, then unfortunately we would be forced to remove all data that you have contributed. We would very much like to avoid that!

Cheers
Frederik Ramm (OSMF Data Working Group)

Just in case someone looks at this later, here's an example of how the map was looking with these circular land uses in place: http://www.remote.org/frederik/tmp/landuse-circles3.jpg - it's like you let your 3-year-old play with GIMP...

Here is another example where a residential landuse area stretched along a road - which could have been correctly approximated by a rectangular way using four nodes - has instead been approximated by three circles, two of them overlapping, and two others leaving a gap that does very well have buildings in it: http://www.remote.org/frederik/tmp/landuse-circles2.jpg - this is indeed lazy and careless, and wa waste of resources on top of everything (using 60 nodes instead of 4 and still giving a worse approximation). I have identified about 10,000 such residential landuses added by Pilou@nowhere which have not been improved since they were added, and will remove them now.

I have commented on this issue in changeset/113616927 and will now remove these circular landuses.

Dear Pilou@nowhere, while it is generally acceptable to "approximate" when mapping, drawing guesswork micro-circles across the landscape helps no-one and makes our map the laughing stock of users. I looked at the circles you created and found them more or less random - some circles had no buildings in them, lots of other buildings were outside any circles you drew. If you have some specialist use case for which such guesswork mapping is useful, please find a way to execute the guesswork mapping inside your own toolchain, and not in OSM.

Here is a screenshot of your random residential circles and their problems: http://www.remote.org/frederik/tmp/landuse-circles.jpg

You've had 8 months to clean this up and haven't found it worth doing, so I'll now revert these circles.

iriman, please explain these edits. I can see in the discussion on changeset/123455005 that LockOnGuy cited a number of sources supporting the claim that far from being "clearly Iranian", these islands are indeed subject to a dispute and tagging the boundaries as disputed sounds like the correct solution to me. You have not given any sources for your claim.

Dear seandebasti, could you please use changset comments that are human-readable? "#are #bldg #emporis" leaves me guessing what it is you might have edited here, just like most of your other changesets...

Hello Maturi0n, what is the source of these name:ru tags that you have been adding here?

I think you have overreacted, and have thrown out a number of useful edits together with the problematic ones, for example the addition of fees to toll gantries (https://pewu.github.io/osm-history/#/node/1846273046) which you also wrongly changed back to toll booths. destination:ref tags that had been added in the changeset (which were correct and are useful for turn-by-turn navigation) were removed by you. A lot of valuable information has been lost because of your knee-jerk reaction to a few sharp kinks. Your revert may have repaired a few things but it would have been easier and friendlier had you given the mapper a chance to rectify these issues instead of asserting local dominance and in-your-face reverting the lot. It is too late now to revert your revert without unwanted side effects, else I would have done it, but please never do this again.

Hallo walloHerbrechtingen, ich habe den in diesem Changeset von Dir neu angelegten Weg way/1039687696/history gelöscht, nachdem sich der Landwirt bei OSM beschwert hatte, dass ihm Wanderer durch seinen Acker laufen. Falls Du sicher bist, dass es sich um einen öffentlichen Weg handelt, kannst Du ihn gern wiederherstellen - ich habe jetzt einfach mal der Beschwerde geglaubt.

Hello osmmichi, can you confirm that this path

way/208781198

which you have modified in this changeset does (a) actually exist on the ground and is (b) accessible to the public? Asking because a land owner claims it is on private land.

Dear SandipYadav1317, the "changeset comment" field is primarily intended for other human beings. You are expected to explain your edit in a natural language, either English or the lanugage used locally where the changeset is made.

"#hotosm-project-12776 #BIPAD #YILAB # Rapti #DigitalVolunteers" is not a sufficient changeset comment, it does not explain what you did and why, and all those hashtags are only readable for insiders. It is disrespectful towards other mappers if you do not explain your edit.

Hashtags can be used in addition to a good changeset comment but they cannot replace it.

See osm.wiki/Good_changeset_comments for more information.

This is how it looks when I request Maxar imagery for the area changeset/121991066#map=19/37.10495/15.12180:

http://www.remote.org/frederik/tmp/walls.png

It is impossible to discern the location of inidividual walls on these images. Are you sure you have been using Maxar?

Hello 1T-Money, the data contributed by txemt which you here claim to have been "sloppy" was totally within usual quality standards in OSM. It would not have been necessary to edit after them, and it *certainly* is inappropriate to call these edits "sloppy".

Please stop this aggressive behaviour, and stop demonstratively "improving" contributions by txemt when they are not plainly wrong.

Dear fayor, can you clarify your source for these edits? You have added a large number of walls in the North of the town (Via Luigi Pirandello etc.) and these walls are not visible on aerial imagery.