I’d like to give a bit of context around the earlier statement by Amanda:

The OSMF Board (&DWG) had many discussions with Microsoft about Map Builder. Eventually they got blocked osm.org/user_blocks/5701

For those unfamiliar with the history, an earlier version of Map Builder used a single user account (a puppet) to upload all changes by Bing Map Builder contributors. This meant that it was impossible to trace back a change to a single person, and thus impossible to give that person feedback (or to ban that person in case of vandalism/spam).

As such, the OSMF+DWG decided to block that single account.

@Thierry1030:

1. Bing Map Builder was presented to the OSM-community during state of the map in August 2022. You can rewatch the talk here

2. I was triggered by this reddit post to investigate. I didn’t like the effect of these random usernamesstrings, so I started digging and analysing, culminating into this post. So yes, this is all own research. (Of course, part of my curiousity is because I make an OSM-editor as well, so it is important to see what the others are up to - especially if they claim to be an editor ‘that is simple to use’)

3. I’m not involved with the OSMF; I don’t know if they were aware of these issues, nor do I know if they got in touch with Microsoft about these issues. My main motivation for this post is exactly to make sure they know and to mitigate this.

(Small note to the OSMF: sorry for lighting this fire! I know that you have other stuff to do, and be rather busy with more constructive stuff - but I do think this is important enough to bring it to your attention with a bit of drama. You are heroes to take up such a big responsibilities! It’s precisely because I don’t like dealing with this kind of drama and legal issues that I’ll never run as board member…)

@mikelmaron: I agree that the alarmism is maybe a bit overdone. For all of the issues I mention, good reasons can be brought up (such as the fact that signing up has a lot of friction). Yet, the sum of all these parts is something that deeply worries me.

Second, the alarmism does a good job at getting the message out to get this fixed - the goal of me writing this is that things improve.

Third, the scenario’s and conclusions I’m drawing here are very pessimistic and it the future probably won’t unfold this way - but by thinking about this possible future and communicating it in clear terms, we can, as a group, hopefully get to a better place. The missing attribution and the ability to have two accounts has probably already confused some potential contributors; that is doing real harm.

Indeed, a delete doesn’t exist. I was a bit surprised ad well, but’ll reuse this later on

@lyx: ah, well, that explains a bit! Mangrove has an embedable widget somewhere as well, that might be a solution for opencampingmap.

Hi there,

I want to grow MapComplete (https://mapcomplete.osm.be) into a direction that would solve these usecases. Any interest in testing this?

Really cool!

A fun observation: all images reported are from europe. This is certainly a bug, here is an example of a point which has an imgur image.

The overpass-script is:

``` [out:json][timeout:25]; // gather results ( // query part for: “image~/https:\/\/i.imgur.[…]” nwr“image”~”https://i.imgur.*”;

); // print results out body; >; out skel qt; ```

The only two non-european images (japan) are false-positives (I’ve removed the ‘redirect’ in OSM by now).

AT last, the link to the license is slightly incorrect and gives the image, not the imgur page. An image link such as https://i.imgur.com/ABC.jpg should be transformed into https://imgur.com/ABC (thus without i. at the start and without .jpg at the end).

But still, the end result is very interesting! I’m honoured that other people are using the results of MapComplete to make their own stuff with it :) That’s very motivating for me.

@rtnf: Lol, the link to the attribution does the job - it’s very efficient toward development time XD. It made me smile

Someone also made an unofficial theme once showing all POI with images: https://mapcomplete.osm.be/theme?userlayout=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2Fseppesantens%2FMapComplete-Themes%2Fmain%2FOpenImageMap%2FOpenImageMap.json

I didn’t include it into main MC, as there is no way to select a random POI type and add an image to it, so it doesn’t fit with the broader vision but it’s still nice.

Oh, btw: there now also exists an automated mastodon-bot posting images daily: https://botsin.space/@MapComplete

@rtnf: Heh, didn’t know that page existed! It’s pretty cool ;)

Just a nitpick: some images are licensed under CC-BY or CC-BY-SA, which means that you should show the attribution. Find a snippet of code here on how to extract it.

My second question: why did you create this page?

Hey @GOwin,

There is an obscure page showing statistics on MapComplete: https://pietervdvn.github.io/mc/develop/?mode=statistics

I’ve updated it just now to include a filter “should have at least one image”. Then you can browse all the changesets which added a picture. However:

• this does not include the license of the image
• This does not work before october 2021, as this relies on a flag in the changeset metadata which was only added then
• (And as I just deployed, it still has to run through the pipeline; the ‘add-image’-filter should be online in about an hour)

Hi!

I’m the author of mapcomplete, and wanted to let you know that the waste map might be helpful for you

https://mapcomplete.osm.be/cyclofix allows to add bicycle racks on the field (if you zoom in enough)

Thanks for the encouragement!

This all started by chance, by PlantNet posting something on the dev mailing list ;)

Hi,

Yup! I know that these ML-identifications might not be perfect - which is why the end-user is still responsible of picking an appropriate species. Furthermore, the source (plantnet-ai) is indicated in both the changeset-tags and the object itself, so that other mappers know that this was an AI-detection.

Pictures are uploaded to IMGUR and must be available, that is where PlantNet fetches them too.

I’m aware of Waarnemingen.be (I’m from Belgium), but this integration was due to a mail on the dev mailing list. As it turned out, it was quite easy to integrate, so here we are :p

And privacy leaks are indeed an issue. In this case, the IP-address and those images are sent to plantnet, so that is acceptable. MapComplete does not collect info (only basic statistics via goatcounter), but leaks a bit about the user location via the changesets. This privacy of the mapper is however a broader discussion we should have within the community.

Hi Luque,

I’ve also made mapcomplete.osm.be/artwork to map artwork. This way, it is easy to add pictures on the go, and your mapping work will show up on other apps such as OSMAND.

Kind regards, Pieter

Hi @tordans,

There are definitively drawbacks to this approach of notes and MapRoulette would indeed be better (but is harder to setup).

I do agree that it doesn’t scale very well beyond a few 100 points per city; but within that reach it does work well. But for bigger datasets it’ll be too much.

Also have a look at the MapComplete theme about charging stations

@Minh_Nguyen: I do understand the concerns with ISCED-tagging, but they seem to be mostly US-centric issues and ISCED seems to be the most workable right now. I’ve written my thoughts on the wiki page.

About language: `language:xy’ on a language_school does become pretty confusing. If someone speaks “ab” and wants to learn “xy”, you’ll probably want to go to a school where the teachers and the administration speak “ab” and give the grammer rules in “ab”. To be consistent, we’d need to move the subject of teaching to some other key

@Kovoshiz: I also removed the distinction between professional and academic higher tertiary education.