About names and languages - above someone’s said that “but at very least they should be mapped as name.zh= with name= tags reserved for names in local languages as per OSM convention”. For the avoidance of doubt, that’s not what the OSMF’s policy says.

I can think of plenty of places around the world where “the main language of a country is X, but people here most speak Y”. The OSM policy is as closely as possible to follow the situation on the ground in the “name” tag and to ensure that name:xx tags are used to capture other genuine names for places (i.e. not just transliterations) in other languages. Sometimes OSM communities decide to use multiple names in the “name” tag, and that’s fine too, providing that’s really the local community decision.

One more point about verifiability and sources, alas it seems that the terms of https://www.sentinel-hub.com/explore/sentinelplayground/ (see here) at any licence level below Enterprise are “Non-commercial use”or a CC licence that isn’t compatible with OSM. There are potential ways forward involving asking the organisation (or who actually licences the imagery, if someone different) whether OSM could use it, but without that it looks like we can’t use it right now.

(replying to part of NM$L’s comment above addressed to me):

I also understand that the so-called “patriotism” and other content you mentioned is not useful for OSM data, but you can’t prevent people from holding “patriotism” because of this. Even I believe you do.

On the latter point, in my case you might be surprised, but it’s absolutely true that many/most people have a sense that “their community” or “their society” is somehow “better”, “different” or “exceptional”. In OSM I’ve seen evidence of that from the UK, US and German communities among others - it’s an entirely normal part of the human condition.

Howver, in OSM we have a concept of verifiability, meaning not just “I think this is X” but “if other people looked at it, they’d think it was X too” To take another border dispute as an example, where should OSM say one country ends and another begins? The answer in that dispute (after discussions in OSM forums designed to include all sides) was “where the military frontier is”. This frontier is very clear on aerial images, and while they can sometimes be open to interpretation, the aerial images themselves don’t have a political point of view - they’re just pictures.

Let’s not have an argument about values (at least, not in OSM) but instead let’s talk about verifiable data. What evidence is there in this case that is not tainted by political influence from either side of the dispute?

@NMSL - the last line of your comment translates for me as “Your present whole article is the one that plausibly pours out your political views”.

That’s more than a little bit disingenuous coming from someone who has an OSM profile that currently says “𝑆𝑎𝑓𝑒𝑔𝑢𝑎𝑟𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙 𝑠𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑖𝑔𝑛𝑡𝑦, 𝑢𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑙 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑔𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑖𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑏𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑓 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝐶ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑒 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒, 𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑙𝑢𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑎𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑜𝑡𝑠 𝑖𝑛 𝐻𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝐾𝑜𝑛𝑔, 𝑀𝑎𝑐𝑎𝑜 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑇𝑎𝑖𝑤𝑎𝑛” below a map of the People’s Republic of China’s claimed, rather than on the ground, borders, and your “(do not rule out the future)” / “（不排除未来会）” comment above.

With a DWG hat on I’ve helped several people in this thread (on all sides of this issue) with previous problems and with the rest of the DWG will continue to do so - interpreting the policy as fairly and as even-handedly as we can. It would however help everyone to turn down the rhetoric somewhat - references to “𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑏𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛”, “commies” or “patriotism” don’t really help anyone - as long as we share a common planet we’ll have to work together.

Andy (from the DWG)

I’ve read through this a couple of times now, and I still can’t tell if it is serious or meant as a satire. Among lots of other bullshit bingo, you talk about “humanitarian disruptors” and “thought partners” - can this really be meant as a serious article?

Not once do I see a reference to the people that HOT is supposed to serve. You say (of HOT’s directors) “we listen a lot to each other” - how about listening a bit more widely than that?

– Andy (as is usual in diary comments, writing in an entirely personal capacity)

It is about Chinese government actively encouraging its citizens to exploit international platforms to spread its vision of the world.

We actually see that sort of thing for lots of places - at least we see lots of what is essentially the same form email filled in by different people, and sometimes we get requests form government officials and agencies too. I’ve dealt with at least one in the last year from someone who signed themselves as something like “Insert Name Here”, so it’s fair to say that sometimes the people passing these on don’t always read them too closely.

In terms of consolidated tickets, over the last year we’ve had most related to the Armenia / Azerbaijan conflict, then various Chinese conflicts, and then (tied for third) Ukraine / Crimea and India. If we get a dozen copies of the same complaint we’ll consolidate them onto one ticket, of course.

Where goverment officials aren’t directly involved it’s not possible to say whether these were initiated by a particular goverment or not - clearly levels of authoritarianism and “management of thought on the Internet” vary hugely around the world**, but this sort of “Internet Tribe” behaviour isn’t just limited to people living under authoritarian regimes - just look anywhere that comments are allowed on subjects as diverse as politics, football or bitcoin.

** and I’m certainly not trying to suggest some kind of moral equivalence among all governments here.

This is definitely a matter for OSMF and DWG to act on.

@ndrw6 , if you look at the “Changesets vandalising TW” above you’ll see that in each case (respectively 5, 3, 3 3 and 3 years ago) each was dealt with - the approach taken was to engage with the person making the change and explaining how OSM works; the key document being the “disputed territory” one here. The person replying is a DWG member.

At very least we need to be able to streamline tracking such changes…

My reply to that would be quite simple - “go on then”.

All of the tools available to users within the OSM community (including the DWG) were written by members of the OSM community (again, including the DWG). If you believe that something is missing you’re more than welcome to create that missing something.

This isn’t just a problem around Taiwan or around mainland China - elsewhere in other conflict areas we regularly see OSM users trying to put across their political views by “small” changes to borders (nudging a few nodes here and there) or admin level changes (“so and so isn’t really a country”). Part of this is just a misunderstanding of what OSM should show - we think Taiwan most definitely is a country because it passes the duck test for one; some other international organisations (such as the United Nations and the IOC) do not. The DWG regularly gets complaints of the form “The United Nations thinks X therefore you should also think X”.

Tracking the on-the-ground situation via international press reports (in a variety of languages, often with conflicting biases) is hard. Arguably a much easier problem would be tracking area changes to admin entities such as countries (if you want to help, you could even use this as a starting point).

Andy

(from the Data Working Group)

Oh dear. It does seem that this diary entry comes from a place of pain.

As a native English English speaker, I’m not sure I recognise your “UK” definition of driveway - and anyway, even though OSM tends to use British English rather than the alternatives, there are plenty of exceptions - such as “city” - where OSM generally (and OSM communities seperately) have come up with a definition that doesn’t just come from one dictionary.

If I understand what you’re saying, it’s that “service roads linking parking aisles to roads that are not service roads should be tagged as service=something”, and that “something” can’t be “driveway” because that is used for something else? If so. I’d spend a bit more time explaining why that is a problem - what real-world tasks won’t be possible without this clarification?

I don’t think that’s entirely fair to say:

In the absence of such changes, we can only continue to tag the SHC and UK definition of driveway as service=driveway2.

when a quick look at https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/service=driveway2#map (and who’s tagging what) suggests that “we” in that sentence is referring to mostly just one mapper - you.

I’m also not sure that I can see the “appalling and un-professional behaviour” that you link to either (in fact I had to guess who you might be referring to based on which of the linked page’s edits was a wiki admin).

As a footpath user, knowing that something is an abandoned railway is pretty useful information - I know it’ll be flat!

I’d tend to use both tags on something that is both.

There are lots of places where you might downlaod things containing OpenStreetMap data. What are you downloading, and from where?

Incidentally, I’ve just commented on an “#AtlasChecks” changeset at osm.org/changeset/107663718 . It looks there as if a fake name added by a former contributor has accidentally been reapplied by Facebook, perhaps because the comparison data set wasn’t up to date?

DWG can’t (or doesn’t want to) provide a reasonable explanation

To be clear - that’s not actually true. A number of Ukrainian mappers wrote to the DWG last night, and on behalf of the DWG I replied to them all (since I’ve not been involved in this particular dispute until now). It wasn’t what I had planned for a Friday evening, but there you go. Some pertinent points of those replies are paraphrased below, and my comments for the benefit of people not familiar with the issue are in square brackets:

For the avoidance of doubt - and I’m quoting from the block message here - a DWG member wrote “I will block your account until you remove it from your profile”. That makes it very clear that this isn’t a “block for 10 years” - it is a “block until the text is removed from the user profile”.

[Subsequent to me writing that message, user profiles were changed and blocks were removed].

[the next part refers to the user profile message itself, which was threatening to burn people of a different political persuasion to the writers]

Moving on to the text itself, it can be difficult to decide where to draw the line between what is satirical and what is offensive. However, wanting to burn anyone or anything is clearly not OK, even when the thing you want to burn is a cartoonish representation of someone with a particular political point of view.

https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Etiquette was adopted some time ago by the board as the way that people within OpenStreetMap should try to interact with one another, even when they hold conflicting views (political and otherwise). In the DWG we understand that, especially in the case of political disputes, this can be difficult, but as members of the OSM community we all owe everyone else within the community a fair hearing.

[extracts end]

To summarise, hate speech in OSM is never OK. It isn’t excused by the fact that the people writing it are from a country that has been partly annexed by another; OSM is one worldwide project. Everyone understands that it is difficult, but we have to try and find a way to work together.

If you think that there’s something that the DWG should do that it isn’t doing then please let us know (either to data@osmfoundation.org or directly to me if you prefer).

Best Regards,

Andy Townsend, on behalf of OSM’s Data Working Group.

Would it be appropriate to keep it name=pikachu pass if there are signs indicating this?

Yes. Also, if a road is “colloquially known as Pikachu Pass” then “loc_name=Pikachu Pass” is entirely appropriate too.

Some real-world names and tag combinations do appear unlikely at first glance - http://osm.mapki.com/history/way.php?id=128265146 is or was apparently a nice steak house in Burkina Faso (see osm.org/changeset/16601166), but has been “corrected” to be a burger joint on a couple of occasions. People making corrections like this aren’t helping to improve the quality of the data in OSM.

It’s also true that “new mapper errors” aren’t in any sense vandalism. The appropriate course of action there is to educate new mappers about how names are used in OSM, and what they can do to see the data that they are interested in (perhaps use a different map or app if the one that they are using does not show what they have just added).

All that said, it should be relatively easy for everyone to follow this activity - as required by the OEG osm.wiki/Organised_Editing/Activities/Facebook#Atlas_Checks says that “ Atlas Checks detections are given the following hashtag: #AtlasChecks”.

What actually determines “profanity” here? Would e.g. the loc_name on https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/854436697 be a problem? That loc_name is easily verified. What steps are taken to ensure that valid names considered “profane” in some dialects of English aren’t removed?

In OpenStreetMap terms, it absolutely is. See https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/d8/DisputedTerritoriesInformation.pdf for how disputed territories are mapped within OpenStreetMap.

用OpenStreetMap术语来说，绝对是。 请参阅https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/d8/DisputedTerritoriesInformation.pdf，了解如何在OpenStreetMap中映射有争议的领土。

You’ve commented a couple of times (here), they haven’t replied.

If you’d like the DWG to send them a message that they have to read before continuing to edit, let us know.

Also, it might be worth explaining what OSM actually is. They’re using MAPS.ME and may think that they are adding personal bookmarks in there.

Cheers,

Andy (from the DWG)

As I mentioned elsewhere, this accusation reads very much like a conspiracy theory (and a poorly-written one at that).

You’ve made a number of hand-wavy claims here, and have used language designed to be inflammatory (“removed … by a server intervention”, “Tile manufacturers are probably responsible for this”, “fake”, “mapping for the renderer”).

What you’ve omitted to say is what you think is what you think is actually wrong. Also I don’t see how a map style could possibly be guilty of “mapping for the renderer” - a map style is the renderer.

You’ve had a number of disagreements with the Austrian community (see https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-at/2020-December/thread.html#10905 et al). This claim just looks to be a continuation of that dispute - a disagreement with what other people think OSM is about.

One thing that you can’t accuse OSM’s “standard” map style of is being hidden. For example, the main “meadow” rendering rules are here. What I see when I zoom in and out of a meadow area is entirely consistent with what the code looks like it’s trying to do. You may not be a fan of that “way_pixels determine polygon-gamma” effect (I’m not), but you can’t accuse the renderer (or the tile server) of doing something different to the code.

Can you link to an actual OSM object that is handled inconsistently?

I’m not so sure about that…

Are you perhaps trying to enter a competition for the Plain English Campaign’s “Golden Bull Award”? Come on - “solutioning” - really! Even better, the links are to Google Docs files so many of the people that it’d be great to get feedback from simply won’t be able to read them.

If I was to make one suggestion it would be this:

HOT as an organisation should take more responsibility for users of platforms such as https://tasks.hotosm.org , and especially for ensuring that people posting projects there are educated about what they need to do, and if people fail to do what they should HOT should take action to ensure that (a) existing tasks are taken down ad they don’t create new tasks and (b) any problems with existing data are sorted out. With a DWG hat on I’m currently tidying up some of the mess left around the world by the company that Pete Masters talked about here. Unfortunately, poor-quality contributions where there isn’t a significant local OSM community won’t often be seen - the DWG are still getting reports in dribs and drabs as locals try and communicate with the problem mappers, nothing happens, and they come to us instead. In his reply, Pierre Béland summed up the sitation very well - this is not an isolated problem.

We (the DWG) were requested by HOT to delete everything that these contributors had added (in practice we’re only doing that where the quality is so bad that starting from scratch is less work than amending what’s there; but unfortunately that’s true in most cases). At a rough guess** I’d say 10-15% of these problem edits had been detected by other OSM users in the 15-20 or so days since these edits were made, suggesting that 85-90% were not.

Best Regards,

Andy, from the DWG

** difficult, because changeset sizes vary