There are some object categories in OSM whose exact classification is often a matter of contention and edit wars. Main highways are one of the most prominent examples. There was a small edit war in Poland which resulted in no less than 4 blocks, but I did not let that crisis go to waste:

Behold road-watcher, a quick Python project that regurarly queries Overpass API for highway=secondary and above within a specified boundary and then detects any classification changes, sending them to a Discord channel (though it’s trivial to substitute it with another means of notification).

There are some users who register an account and then wait a few years before making their first edit. But this is the longest period, which I stumbled upon when browsing https://welcome.osm.be/ :

osm.org/user/shathis

Registered in 2009-12-04, first edit 2021-11-06.

Who will give more? :)

Here’s another analysis made with ChangesetMD. I looked at average changeset count in each hour of the week for Poland. Week begins on Monday (pn).

Some trends are quite interesting. For instance, on Friday evenings people would rather party than map ;)

Also, we can see a little drop on business days around 17. I guess that people are going back from work? Does this imply they’re mapping at work shortly before? :>

Much has been said about users of different OSM editor applications regarding their ability to respond to other users’ feedback about their mapping. But why not let the data speak for themselves?

Here’s a quick chart I made.

I used ChangesetMD to import data into Postgres database, where I did the analysis.

So the current JOSM release allows you to load and save *.osn files. There is a daily notes dump available at http://planet.osm.org/notes/

But you can’t filter them to only display those that are open. I wanted to find a solution. First, I thought about writing Python or C# app. Turns out there is much simpler solution: XPath is a syntax for XML element selection. With xml_grep from xml-twig-tools package I can apply it to an XML file like this:

xml_grep –exclude /*/note[@closed_at] planet-notes-latest.osn > open_notes.osn

You can of course extend this expression to filter by geographic area or date.