I understand your concern and this sounds very tedious. The big picture is of course the trade-off, how many potential users do we lose if we start creating tiers where the bottom tier can’t do much?

Personally if we already had a system where you can draw buildings, roads, put in POI nodes as a new user but not touch administrative boundaries unless upgraded by another established user, I would be thrilled.

But we lack the tools for this, the programmers, time and more. Nodes shared between boundaries and roads or residential areas complicate this, we would have to run scripts to seperate them to allow boundaries/admin relations to be transferred to another layer.

Personally I’m watching a fairly large area but it is sparsely populated and the number of new users is a few each month (sadly). The RSS feeds make it much easier though to keep up.

It would be good to hear stories from Poland, they got something like 600 new users in a week after some tech show. How did those users do? Much vandalism?

As has already been said: the Brazilian community does not have a larger relative (to the existing community) influx of new users than others. See http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosmcountry.php?c=Brazil given that Brazil is clearly less densely mapped that numerous other regions the “problem” if at all is smaller not larger than in other areas.

A ways to improve the situation is for example to send a (kind) welcome message to new mappers, at the same time you can easily check for any issues with their mapping..

JOSM has ability to hide (filter out) any type of node/way/relation. Maybe some objects should be untouchable for new users in iD. Also, iD should notify user that add a comment to the changeset is very polite to other users (at least).

Dear @SimonPoole

thank you for telling me that this is only a minor problem and that everything is easy to fix.

I wish I could agree.

You are invited to see my next diary entry where I report exactly what you are suggesting. I send each of the new users a very kind and cheerful welcoming message. Unfortunately I can only send that message after some of them have done their damage already.

I wish I could send these messages upon registration instead for waiting them to do their first edit. My experience however is that sometimes quite a lot of trouble follows even after sending our messages.

Deat @Stalfur

about your comment: I The big picture is of course the trade-off, how many potential users do we lose if we start creating tiers where the bottom tier can’t do much?

I don’t think that protecting new, and not-so-new users from themselves would be counter productive, on the contrary.

One simple and effective way would be to introduce expertise levels in iD, something like “beginner”, “intermediate” and “advanced”. These could be set by the user himself, with “beginner” being the default level. For example, at the “beginner” level relations would not be editable and no deletions of any kind would be allowed. Afterwards, if the user feels more confident mapping and using iD he could change this to a higher level.

But then there is another pressing question: how many experienced users are we loosing because they are getting tired of seeing their work shred to pieces all the time?

@Gerald I didn’t say it was a minor problem, just that it is no different than anywhere else (and that it tends to get better over time).

Every new user is shown osm.org/welcome on first login, you might want to check if the Portugese wording is correct.

That’s not an enviable situation you are in. It’s always annoying when we have to fix mistakes of new contributors instead of spending the time on mapping.

There’s one thing I wonder about, though: If there are only 2 active mappers in that metropolitan area, where does all the data come from? Have there been other contributors in the past that are no longer active? From your post, it sounds as if you are maintaining much more data per user than mappers in my area are.

Dear @Tordanik

About your question: There’s one thing I wonder about, though: If there are only 2 active mappers in that metropolitan area, where does all the data come from? Have there been other contributors in the past that are no longer active? Most of the data was there already when I started in 2012 and was added by users which I have never seen in mailing lists. I assume most of them have left the project. It would seem that the amount of experienced users is not really growing. I know of only one active user who moved away and is still mapping in another Brazilian city.

Ireland is fairly well-mapped, with what I guess is a comparatively high number of veteran mappers per km2. Yet I’m often (depending on my mood) spending most of my osm time coaching new users. Just one anecdote in the “this problem is not specific to Brazil” camp.

It’s tedious work, and I can see how disheartening it can be if you’re the only one doing this in your area, but it’s more useful than just fixing mistakes. It’s also for advocacy and for recruiting. Some of those map-breakers will eventually become fully competent and share your load; coaching them increases the likelyhood of that.

Hi Gerald,

I myself watch edits in a couple of areas in Germany where I live or lived using WhoDidIt. I do not have the problem of newbies deleting boundaries. This might have a couple of reasons:

• Newbies in Karlsruhe and Heilbronn area ususally add POIs (everything else has been mapped yet).
• The area in East Germany has few newbies.
• Boundaries usually do not share nodes with other objects in Germany. They are usally independent ways and not tagged on highway ways, too.
• We have less vandalism.

Do you in Brasil need mapper(s) from abroad monitoring (newbie) edits and giving you lists of changesets/users you have to write a message to every one or two days? I think it is easy to decide, if an edit is harmful, maybe harmful or not harmful, if someone does not understand the local language.

Best regards

Michael

@Gerald

Much of the data in your area was imported by lmpinto back when GeoMinas confirmed their data in license compatible with OSM License, I think there have been a few other heavy contributors as well, but as far as I know, most of these have not been much active since 2010. There are few users from the first years that still contribute to the project, apart from me I think Claudiomiro (first registered Brazilian), vitorgeorge, Nighto and umehling is of the oldest contributors still active.

And yes, monitoring such large areas occupy much time, correcting errors and damages from new and inexperienced users are difficult and take up much time. And there are things that can be done without much compromising the current status. What I would like to see is a much stronger system to force changeset comments, as this would help me in how much time I need to check each individual changeset, further I would like that new users get a friendly community welcome message, for users contributing first time in Brazil this should be in Portuguese, presenting our mailing list, forum link, WikiProject Brazil page, and irc channel among other useful information, so that the new users are presented with where he or she can ask for help if they are in doubt, among other.

Myself I am monitoring the state of Espirito Santo, which is quite a large area, and just as my work severely limited the time I have available for OSM, I got a new user doing (until now) about 80 small changesets. As far as I can tell, nothing harmful, but it have taken close to all the time I have had available for OSM since thursday.