The editor usage stats wiki page has two useful tables for comparing editors: by number of users and by number of edits. And while MAPS.ME reach is clearly visible in the first one (alas, it hasn’t still surpassed iD in users), the second table has much lower numbers for the mobile editor. Which is reasonable: MAPS.ME does not allow editing geometry, thus a single user can make more edits in a day, than all MAPS.ME users in a month.

I was wondering if we could compare only the type of edits our mobile editor allows, that is, POI edits. And with daily replication diffs, I did:

This chart shows that while users of iD and JOSM editor create more points of interest than MAPS.ME users, it’s not by a large margin.

I noticed days when 10k or 20k new POIs were uploaded with JOSM, and wondered if the picture would change if we took median values for days of each month. That is, from a sorted array of numbers we would take the middle number. Turns out, not much.

Most of us know how hard it is to update POI data, besides fixing geometry or fixing tags. Not only you have to go out and collect new opening hours or names, but also you must know that something has changed. Mobile editors usually excel at that, so why editing numbers are higher for desktop editors? That’s because I could not separate meaningful tag edits from automated, or geometry changes from tag edits. Maybe if I could, MAPS.ME’s share of POI edits would be much higher.