[afeezaziz]

I am supporting OSM and have dedicated a team of three executives to do updating for OSM.

Nevertheless, I have this burning question on how can we prevent people to abuse OSM by making false edits intentionally. This is an important issue as a lot of applications depend on OSM.

[shirakawasuna]

There's a lot of comparisons between Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap, and I think this one is valid: when Wikipedia first started out, its mission was to populate new articles. As most topics became fleshed out, they transitioned to having higher editorial standards (ignoring the various dramas for now) and spending more time curating existing articles.

OpenStreetMap is in that 'early' phase: tons of edits are adding new data for fundamental things: streets, houses, addresses, land uses. And it has a barrier to entry - you have to be a tiny bit nerdy to confidently make edits. But in the not-so-distant future, it will need to transition to more and more maintenance and data quality tasks.

Personally, I think a good intermediate step will be to embed better and more automated review processes. The simplest one is in use by companies/agencies that use the data already:

1. Take a snapshot of your region. Vet it for your use case and deploy.

2. Grab a new snapshot at a later date (time to update the service). Look at the changes - is anything wrong or popping out at you? If so, fix it, then download + deploy.

If this becomes the primary means of adding data to OSM, a similar two-step process could be embedded into the contribution mode: Add data, then get the edit reviewed. Plus, there are automated tools to spot and characterize changes already (e.g. QA tiles) and they'll only get better.

[orblivion]

> And it has a barrier to entry - you have to be a tiny bit nerdy to confidently make edits.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete

Highly recommended for on-the-fly edits. It's available on F-Droid too. The most complicated part of it is entering your OSM account credentials (and perhaps the fact that you have to tell it to Upload changes; early versions didn't even require that). From there on, you just wander around town and you click on POIs and roads that pop up, and it asks you to fill in very specific bits of missing information. What are the opening hours of this place? What's the address of this house? What kind of roof does this house have? What style of road is this? What's the speed limit? Etc. It's got pretty icons and helpful images for what you're labeling (different types of road, different types of roofs, etc), and no confusing frills.

I had the idea for exactly this sort of thing myself for a while. Thankfully somebody did the work for me.

[Cyphase]

I had a similar idea a few years back; an optionally-always-on mapping app that made it really easy to add data and fix existing data, with prompts about nearby things as you're moving around.

Yet another example of how execution is what matters, not the idea.

[bhousel]

> And it has a barrier to entry - you have to be a tiny bit nerdy to confidently make edits.

Serious question - what can we do to lower these barriers to entry? Friendlier community norms? Documentation / tools? Social stuff (groups, meetups, etc?)

I'd love to hear people's experiences on contributing, and your honest feedback. I'm one of the "core" members of OSM (I maintain the iD editor) and we're always looking for ways to improve the new user experience.

> Personally, I think a good intermediate step will be to embed better and more automated review processes.

I agree! For now, most review is done manually by volunteers. We're looking for ways to make this process more efficient.

If you haven't already, check out the OSMCha changeset review tool: https://osmcha.mapbox.com/

It runs some checks against every changeset as they occur, and presents a newsfeed-style list for anybody to review. It also has filters, in case you are interested only in certain geographic regions.

[Tyrannosaur]

I recently started mapping, and scaled the learning curve that surprised me how high it is. I downloaded streetcomplete and Vespucci for my phone, but when I came to a road (on my bike) that didn't exist on the map it wasn't obvious to me how to add it (I still don't know how to do it on either app).

When I finally hopped on my desktop computer and did the iD tutorial, a lot of things became much easier. I learned how to add roads and buildings, and started doing so. Then I noticed that my map software (osmAnd) didn't announce my freeway exits.

To figure out how to mark freeway exits properly was terrible. I found the motorway wiki page and the motorway link page, but from those pages I didn't feel like I could tag an exit properly still. When I finally found the exit_info page things made a little more sense why they are confusing: there are conflicting ways of doing it! I started tagging freeway exits near me.

One thing that would have been helpful for me (although would probably be a bit of work to implement) would be more overview-level tools. Like "I want to..." a) add a missing building, b) tag a freeway exit, c) give addresses to these buildings, etc. Granted, some of this is already done. I suppose it's really the exit tagging that is a new example.

I also have been worrying about my changes being erroneously modified by other people, without a way to "take ownership" of an area and be notified of changes- I will take a good look at that OSMCha change set tool.

[greenhouse_gas]

>Serious question - what can we do to lower these barriers to entry? Friendlier community norms? Documentation / tools? Social stuff (groups, meetups, etc?)

You can't edit while wasting time on the computer. You have to actually go to places you want to add. It makes scaling hard.

[rmc]

> There's a lot of comparisons between Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap

Yes there is. There are some differences, which the OSM community has written up to help Wikipedians get up to speed: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Wikipedia_use...

tl;dr OSM is all about the original research, much stricter about copyright, etc

[afeezaziz]

Do you know if there is a 'method' to train executives to work on OSM data update? We would like to devote more resources for OSM especially in South East Asia but we are afraid that the work might not be scalable. Right now, most of our execs just google the information e.g. highway toll and update it.

[rmc]

> Right now, most of our execs just google the information e.g. highway toll and update it.

Careful not to copy from other maps! That's copyright infrigment, and against the OSM rules.

[ryandrake]

If anything, OSM is over-policed. I remember going in and fixing up some divided roads that were criss-crossed at each intersection. I went in and carefully "unbraided" them and aligned the roads so they were parallel and matched the underlying road geometry. Lo and behold a day or so later I got a message from some guy outraged that I would make such an edit to his roads and asking me to revert the work. Thanks for nothing I guess. I reverted the change for him and never made another edit contribution to OSM.

[bhousel]

Sorry to hear that you had a bad experience.. For what it's worth, it sounds like your edit was fine (what you described is actually the preferred way to map divided roads) and should not have caused any issue.

I'd love for you to give it another chance! A few of us do monitor the changeset discussion feed in Slack, and try to speak up when we see new users being mistreated.

[Mediterraneo10]

I am sorry to hear you had a bad experience. I have never encountered that kind of grumpiness from a user in my eight years of OSM editing, so I personally don't feel that it is overpoliced. And no editor is obliged to revert a change if the editor can simply explain how it was a correct one.

[cotillion]

I've also given up on OSM due to all the toxic territorial mappers. The idea that the real world might have changed since they last biked through the area unfortunately eludes many of the kind of people attracted to OSM.

[RegW]

Sorry, I don't have an answer, but I just feel the need to say that OSM isn't alone. Google doesn't handle it any better when it comes controlling poisoned data.

Some years ago, in my town some moron (probably in some half-assed attempt to get the town council to deal with its incredible lack of cycling infra-structure), managed to mark pretty much every pavement as a cycleway. Of course the effect is to present the town to potential visitors as very cycle friendly. It ain't - but the council don't care.

I submitted a number of notifications to Google via the appropriate link. Even attaching screenshots from StreetView showing the "No Cycling" signage. The only response was an automated reply. Years later Google is still showing these non-existant cycleways, so I assume that all notifications of incorrect data go straight to /dev/null.

Edit: perhaps the answer is for OSM to provide a downvote button for bad features.

[lazyjones]

> how can we prevent people to abuse OSM by making false edits intentionally.

I wish they had a method of automatically identifying relevant signs from images with GPS data. Sooner or later, cars and AR-enabled apps will be able to produce these as by-products of normal use.

[maxerickson]

There's multiple efforts along those lines.

Mapillary provides sign detections to OSM:

https://blog.mapillary.com/product/2017/02/06/towards-global...

Telenav is doing similar through their OpenStreetCam project (but no good link). I'm not entirely sure, but I think they have the goal of running the detection locally.

Mapbox recently used Bing Streetside imagery to detect turn restrictions (which are important for high quality routing):

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/daniel-j-h/diary/43242

Mapbox and Telenav also compare their incoming position data with OSM and flag discrepancies (missing roads, turn restrictions again, stuff like that).