As far as I can see, the “personal attack” consisted in the reversal of a lot of uncalled-for, undiscussed, and wide-ranging changes of road classifications. It seems to me that this was a legitimate quality control measure and not an attack, much less a “personal” attack.

Please do not tarnish OSM’s reputation with false claims of “personal attacks”.

You have since engaged in re-creating edits made by the deleted account (“pawpositioningsystem”) that you mention here, even though you were asked in https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/7207 not to do so. These edits have been met with questions that you have so far not reacted to. Please urgently explain the rationale behind the highway classification and name changes in the respective changesets (e.g. https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/137665216) before you make any further contributions.

In mmd’s defence, they have been the major contributor to https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=GDPR/Affected_Services since 2018 - that page is as close as we get to a step-by-step implementation manual for GDPR related changes. So, with the groundwork having been laid, it’s a now a SMOP ;)

Neither is perfect! I find that PlantNet is more willing to give you a guess even when all you have is one single photo, whereas Flora Incognita wants you to input more information. But PlantNet has a higher likelihood of whatever proprietary server runs in the the backend not being available, in my experience.

Either software will often give you a couple of likely matches, and one thing I sorely miss is some kind of “decision tree” feature: Something that says “ok, this can either be an X or an Y. The main difference between both is the leaf size. Are the leaves generally smaller than 10cm, then it’s an X, else it’s an Y” (or for a simple real-life example, “this can be an Acer pseudoplatanus or a Platanus x hispanica, check if it has walnut-sized hairy fruit then it’s a Platanus, else an Acer”).

I really think that - echoing SomeoneElse from further above - we must get rid of the expectation which surfaces in many posts here, that the “standard OSM style” needs to be everything to everyone. Because most of those doing the heavy lifting on the map styling side do so because they have an interest in cartography, and cartography is, among other things, the art of reducing things to make a good map.

Whereas everything they ever hear from mappers is the demand for new features to be shown - like in this thread.

It would be great if some day we could get to a point where the Polish community creates the Polish map tiles, and the US community creates the US map tiles, and on osm.org this all flows together into one seamless map. It’s complicated but not impossible. I, for one, do not believe in the panacea of “vector tiles” being bandied about by everyone and their dog - performant vector tiles will have to leave out tons of features. But hey, if someone wants to contribute to the effort of bringing vector tiles to OSM, that’s great and there’s places other than this discussion where they should focus their efforts, and work together with others to bring this to fruition. I’m just saying, if you are part of the vector tile team, prepare to be the target of exactly this kind of criticism one year down the line.

Adamant1, your contributions to OSM have never caused anything but strife, and you’re only here because like a truffle hog to truffles you are attracted to controversy, trying to somehow add oil to any flames you see in order to then lean back and watch the spectacle. I have seen this behaviour from you in OSM too many times, and I will certainly not entertain you. Your insincere statements are not calculated to help finding a solution to problems, but only to create maximum tension. This is not helpful. OSM would be far better off if you left the project altogether.

The map style already suffers from displaying too much, not too little. The reason why development has grind to a halt is that everyone - like you - has their pet thing they want - like parcel lockers - and giving everyone what they want will lead to map that causes only headache. Even today users look at the map and say: I don’t know what all this means. More “democracy” would only lead to more horse trading - you get an icon for your parcel locker if I get a little icon for my used-underwear-vending-machine. This is not the solution.

It is trivial to make an OSM-based map that shows some form of overlay. You can even do it without your own hosting, just based on Overpass queries, or you can host your own overlay layer for faster loading. That would be a simple step towards the “parcel locker” map that you want. Long term, maybe we can have something on osm.org where you can switch individual POIs off and on. Then we could come back to a cleaner cartography, and let people show POIs on top. But there are probably myriad other ideas. Overloading the standard map tiles with ever more icons that nobody understands (and that, by the way, do not appear in any sort of map key either) doesn’t help anyone.

I have hidden a few comments towards the tail end of this discussion as they veered decidedly off-topic and into personal attacks. I’ve tried to also hide comments referring to hidden comments so as not to break context too much.

In my opinion this is not a good idea since (a) any future edit to any part of the coastline will create a new version of those giant polygons you are creating, thereby making such coastline edits more cumbersome, slower to upload, more likely to have a version conflict and so on, i.e. you are making it harder for others to contribute; and (b) you’re very likely introducing random guesswork lines at the outer boundaries of the bays etc. you are mapping i.e. you are deliberately introducing wrong data just to see a label on the map.

In my opinion, your polygons are likely to get deleted at some point in the future, and until then they will have cost you a lot of work and others a lot of nerves, all for nothing.

Quick statement about the misleading quote from Adamant1 above - while I have accurately relayed the position of a (lower) German government institution in the German forum, Adamant1 is lacking context here. We (German mappers) get requests from the government to delete paths all the time; we discuss them openly, and more often than not tell the government that we cannot fulfil their request. That’s standard procedure; there have even been cases where government officials have taken matters in their own hands and removed things they didn’t like, only to be reverted by mappers - mappers who can afford to do this with their full name on display without having to fear retribution. There’s nothing untoward about this. The fact that Adamant1 tries to make it sound problematic is just another example of his pathological craving for dispute.

One thing to keep in mind is that China is not a country with freedom of expression. If China officially claims to control a certain territory, then a Chinese citizen who knows that this claim is wrong would risk getting into serious trouble for saying so - they endanger national security, they’re terrorists, and so on, just look at Hong Kong.

Turning this around, any Chinese citizen who is in line with what the Chinese government claims to be true, might: (a) actually know first-hand that what the government says is true; (b) have consumed government-censored/curated/manipulated material and therefore honestly believe that what the government says is true even where it might not be; (c) know that what the government says is false, but not dare to say it for fear of being put into a “school” for “re-education”.

So it is very hard, from the outside, to trust a Chinese mapper on matters of international interest. Not because they are bad people (they’re not!), but because they live in a country that is at place 160 of 169 on the world freedom index.

In a twist to usual OSM rules (“local mappers know best”), in order to give Chinese users the best map, it might be best if citizens of China refrained from editing anything of international interest (including China’s borders) - or really anything their own government might have an opinion on.

Thanks for all the comments. Where I live, tree databases are a thing typically kept by a city, mostly not so much because they’re interested in trees but because they need to cut them down when they pose a safety risk ;) crucially only trees on public ground will be in the city’s database, and trees on private ground, which can form a significant proportion depending on where you are, are not catalogued.

Biggest issue is probably the fact that especially non-English-speaking users liberally apply the categories “abusive”, “threat”, and “offensive” to things like “someone has placed this business in the wrong location”. There are probably translation issues that stem from these words being translated without context.

Another problem that I might have mentioned in the past is that it is not possible to write a reply from within the issue workflow; the most frequently occurring misunderstanding - someone “reporting” an useless note instead of simply closing it themselves - therefore requires 1. write comment, 2. mark issue as resolved, 3. click in reporter’s user name then click on “send message” then send a message that starts “dear so-and-so, regarding the report you made on note, so-and-so, please understand that you can simply resolve these notes…”, a process that again is fraught with translation issues because when I write that they can “click on resolve” of course I don’t know what the button will be named in their UI. This could be simplified a little if there were a checkbox “also send a message to the complainant” or so when you submit a comment.

The giant issue for DWG is of course that the whole thing is not integrated with OTRS, so the workflow for any non-trivial tickets for us is 1. manually open ticket in OTRS, 2. copy issue text to OTRS ticket, 3. write comment with link to OTRS ticket, 4. mark issue as resolved, 5. if we need to contact the person who raised the ticket, send a personal message within OSM, add a “note” to the ticket in OTRS, copy the message text onto the ticket, and so on (copy potential replies as well). This could be improved if a temporary email address was generated for every complainant and person complained about and these were visible on the issue page; it would then at least be possible to directly send messages to these users from within OTRS. Ideally of course issues would directly be opened in OTRS instead of on OSM. OTRS has an API than can do that.

Funny how quickly this has taken a turn towards the discussion of corporate mapping. This medium is unsuitable for a structured discussion so forgive me if I just drop a few words: 1 - I think that the good map is indeed our highest goal, and diversity, for us, is mainly interesting insofar as we believe it leads to a good map. 2 - Same with community cohesion; we believe that it is a prerequisite for making the good map, and will kick people out of the project altogether if they cannot play with the others. 3 - Values can conflict and if they do there has to be an individual assessment of the case. 4 - Our belief that many (diverse) hands make a good map even if the individual has a very limited concern is a bit like the classic assumption from economic theory that every individual in the economy strives to maximize their personal wealth and this magically leads to a perfect economy. Of course just as it has turned out that this does not work without some regulation in economy, neither does it work without any regulation in OSM.

On a more general level, this discussion seems to lose sight of the difference between the OSMF and OSM. Strictly speaking the OSMF has no mandate to set values for OSM, it can only set values for itself, and any diversity statement claiming that “we want X” issued by the OSMF is about the OSMF and its members, not about OSM and its contributors. The OSMF can define how it wants to operate (i.e. how it wants to pursue its goal of supporting OSM), it cannot define how OSM should be operating. The OSMF can, in its role of supporting but not controlling OSM, perhaps “suggest” values in order to support OSM, but not enforce them. There are some levers here of course; if the OSMF said “ok dear OSM, we’ll stop paying for your servers unless you subscribe to this set of values” then we’d be up for interesting times.

Or maybe the new board has decided to ditch this old-fashioned distinction between an OSMF that supports-but-not-controls the project and the project itself?

Nancy Pelosi (current speaker of the democratic-led House of Representatives of the US government) has this to say about Facebook: https://twitter.com/AdamParkhomenko/status/1217890445033910273/video/1

Accounts that have zero map edits and that post OSM unrelated advertising content in their diary will usually be closed by the site admins. The DWG has nothing to do with that. Accounts that do have meaningful map edits are not simply closed. That this happened to the account of “a friend of” EditConscript (“solmap2”) was a mistake that has meanwhile been remedied.

I’ll offer a couple quick comments on the feedback I have received.

Most importantly, I underestimated the reach of this medium; I had assumed it was essentially consumed by OSM insiders who would have been part of past discussions and hence know the background. Apparently not so, and I apologize to those readers who had to cobble together the background by asking others. I shall give more context in the future.

Some people said that I am lamenting a situation which I, as an OSMF board member, could instead have fixed or helped fix. That’s a fair point; had I concentrated on this one issue I might have been able to move something. I haven’t done that. But does that failure disqualify me from pointing out issues for all eternity? Even the fact that people think the board should get involved is already a sign that something isn’t working right.

Some people tried to tone-police me and disqualify the point being made based on allegedly “toxic” expression. If you are one of these people and have in the past chided the iD developers when they gave condescending replies to polite and factual criticisms, good for you; if you, however, singled me out for “toxicity” while happily turning a blind eye to “toxic” remarks by the iD developers in the past then you are being very selective.

Some said I should have given more examples of what the problem was; I trust appropriate links to issue trackers and mailing list posts have meanwhile been passed around. Again, I mistakenly assumed that everyone had been following the issue.

Some people hoped to advance the discussion by referring to my age; I don’t see what this has to do with anything but I hope you had a good chuckle with your youthful pals on whatever social media platform is en vogue. Guess your next witty joke is going to be about someone’s skin colour.

Some people see an “USA vs. Europe” schism here but I didn’t when I wrote my piece; there are US American maintainers of Open Source projects who manage to behave respectfully towards those who use their software and there are Europeans who give everyone the finger. So, meh.

This isn’t the first time we are having this discussion, and in an earlier instance someone has eloquently said more or less the following: The iD developers excel at coding an user-friendly editor, and they suck at interacting with the community. Communicating their plans, getting buy-in, and dealing with criticism shouldn’t be their job; they should concentrate on what they can do well. De-coupling the OSM web site from the iD release cycle will help with that; ensure that whatever the iD developers do only goes live after it has been carefully looked at. It is not a solution but the first step of one.

And finally, someone complained that I brought “abusive relationships” into this, thereby belittling the suffering of those caught in such situations. My reason for this was that people in abusive relationships often cite reasons for not ending them that go like: “Deep down my partner loves me, and when they lash out this is just because I said something wrong”, or, “I know it is sometimes difficult but I cannot imagine how I could live without my partner”. I found that this mirrors what people in OSM say about iD. I didn’t mean to equate actual physical harm with a couple snotty comments on GitHub, and I’m sorry for that.

I would like to point out:

1. DWG list of members is public and has always been: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Data_Working_Group - It should not be too difficult to find out who of those is “mavl”.

2. DWG membership policy is here: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Data_Working_Group/DWG_Membership_Policy

3. 90% of what DWG does is analyzing edits, talking to people, and reverting things; all this can be - and is! - done by a functioning community without needing special permissions. Most conflicts are solved in the local language on local forums or mailing lists without the involvement of the DWG. The DWG only gets involved when that does not work. If Google translate works right then this is exactly what you are suggesting above?

Best
Frederik Ramm (aka woodpeck)
OSMF DWG member

Alex, we have taken the liberty removing some of your comments above that were insulting on purpose. I welcome your decision to stop engaging the sysadmin team, and just in case you accidentally lapse, I will remove any future derogatory blog entries or comments here. That includes “factual” comments in which you lash out against people between the lines as you have done time and time again in the last months, and anything that is snarky, cynical, or sarcastic.

I also put you on notice that your OSM account may be disabled altogether if you continue insulting and offending our volunteers, or repeat such stunts as to call our service providers and complain about OSM, or take other deliberate steps that are suitable to harm the project. This is not something we would ever do lightly but you have a very long history of getting on everybody’s nerves and this is certainly not just because you are 10 times brighter than everyone else.

There is some merit in some things you say and if you didn’t wrap everything you say in a coat of bile, you might actually be heard. (I believe Ian Dees pointed this out to you in another thread, upon which you replied “don’t tell me what to do”). I am mainly in the business of telling you what not to do, but if I may recommend something then it would be: Get together with some others. Form a group that makes constructive suggestions. Hopefully the others in the group can then take your ideas and communicate them in a way that is not offending, and this could be a win for everyone.

I am writing this in the name of the OSMF Data Working Group who have received a number of complaints about your behaviour.

The Australian POI is interesting in that it was added, then modified by the b-jazz-https-all-the-things bot, then changed back to http by the original mapper (wonder if there’s a possibility for an endless loop here…). I deleted it now, let’s see if it comes back from the dead.

With my DWG hat on, we expect mappers to communicate with the community, at least when they’re asked a question. If you create your account with a throwaway email address but still manage to notice when someone comments on your changeset or messages you in OSM, that’s fine. If you don’t, then DWG will block you after a while, not because you’re bad but because we assume that you must have overlooked people trying to get in touch. If you then continue mapping without communication then you’re likely to be blocked for longer. If you then start creating new accounts to circumvent the block, you have firmly painted yourself in the “bad actors” corner.

I think there is ample evidence that all the accounts being targeted here are indeed controlled by the same entity which is not playing by our rules (in more than one way). They must be treated as one entity, not as hundreds of innocent newbie mappers.

I am not aware of any mapper-to-mapper interaction with any of the accounts being discussed here. If anyone manages to raise any of these accounts and talk to them, explain to them that we have certain minimal quality expectations (like e.g. actually looking when you place a POI, and finding the right tags for a POI instead of just spamming the map with names, etc.) then that would be a very positive step.

This is not helpful and must be removed. OSM notes are not a vehicle to transport “some information that may or may not be useful to the mapper”, and an import that goes “you are all invited to assist in finishing the job” is exactly the kind of import that damages the map.

The data can be useful - put it in a shape file, and everyone can load it in their editor and copy names to osm FROM THE SHAPEFILE instead of from imported nodes.