The first Scout-Telenav 30-day OSM Mapping Challenge just ended. Let me share some of the story.

When it was announce February 11, I was excited. At that time I was already an “addicted mapper”, and fairly sure of my fast-accurate JOSM editing skills, so I figured I could win it. The challenge was for the USA. I usually trace Bing in remote parts of the world, but I did know of a lot of roads in Hawaii that could be quickly cleaned up, so I figured that would give me a quick start.

Week 1

My Hawaii edits did produce a good number of points, but experienced Canadian mapper ingalls was in the lead! He was cleaning Tiger in Texas at an impressive rate. I was slowly catching up, but he remained ahead.

Week 2

Suddenly, when ingalls and I were both at ~30k points, he stopped mapping. I breathed a sigh of relief and took the lead. I found myself doing too many steps in JOSM while editing, and started wondering if I could set up keyboard shortcuts that would let me go faster…

Week 3

Just when I seemed safely in the lead, a user ada_s appeared in the rankings and rapidly went up to second place. All their edits had the same comment, “Add address information + split way when exiting the city border” That seemed like an odd thing to do, but it sure racked a lot of points. I struggled to find enough time to stay ahead (I do have a full-time job and girlfriend) and ada_s continued to gain. At this point, my exploration of the JOSM scripting engine produced some results - I was able to create a lot of single-key shortcuts (like Shift+S, set highway=service) that let me go faster (more about those scripts in my next diary entry). I was working faster now, but ada_s was still gaining on me.

Week 4

I pulled a couple late nights editing, which put me at 57k points but ada_s was at 50k and picking up speed. After another day where our scores both leapt up, I finally took a look at exactly what ada_s was doing. They were putting “addr” and “in_in” tags … on highways. Like, every single road and driveway in Lincoln Nebraska was tagged with “addr:city=Lincoln” and “addr:state=NE”. This seemed very odd to me (not to mention useless), so I took a look at the page for addr and sure enough, it doesn’t say anything about using it on highways (because, why would you?) I sent ada_s a note asking politely why they were adding those addr tags. I also put in a few changesets removing those same tags from a few cities where ada_s had added them (along with other improvements). I then found a particularly messy Tiger region in South Carolina, and dug into it for another late night, my JOSM edits now at great speed. ada_s never responded but they did, suddenly, stop editing. (Maybe they just didn’t know that those tags were useless and nonstandard? It could have been innocent.) They were up to 72k by then, but partly due to undoing their odd tags, I was at 108k. I pulled one more late night then stopped myself. My final score was 145k, ada_s at 72k, followed by quality good editors like “rickmastfan67” and “jonesydesign” at 40-50k.

Conclusion: Having a contest to make the most “edits” does risk people going for questionable things that touch a lot of ways. Perhaps 55k of ada_s’s points were in that category (and hence 55k of my own score undoing them, so my real score should be around 90k; still in first place but not crazy). However, I’m certain that the contest did inspire a big increase in overall quality editing. I certainly got a lot faster, learned JOSM better (and spent time improving the USA, where I usually wouldn’t bother)

They’re doing the contest again (“with simplified rules-and more prizes to win”) and that seems like a good thing to me. I won’t be entering next time (to give you all a chance :-) and I’ll be sharing my JOSM extensions in my next post. My main interest is in getting everyone more productive at editing, for the greater good of OSM.