Dear user_5359,

apparently you are running some sort of OSM quality control tool yourself, or making intensive use of such tools run by others, and you are making many edits the world over, “correcting” things that seem wrong according to some algorithm.

On several occasions in the past, blatantly erroneous or fictional data that had been contributed to OSM has been “corrected” by you in a superficial and careless manner, resulting in exactly the problems typically associated with mechanical edits. To quote a frequent phrase: If someone sees a horse and maps “animal=kow”, then “correcting” that to “animal=cow” does not help anyone. In fact it makes the error harder to spot.

Your careless mechanical edits are not improving OSM. I have made you aware of these issues in the past, and asked you to take great care when applying your edits. Today I find that someone has created a whole fictional city in the Californian desert, and when trying to revert that I see that you have edited all of the streets added by the vandal with a superficial correction of “St” to “Street”: osm.org/changeset/114439350

This is more than useless, it actually sabotages the repair process. Had you had just a shred of local knowledge, you could have known that there’s no settlement there. Had you looked at aerial imagery for one second, you could have known that there is no settlement there. Instead you blindly changed “St” to “Street” on 50 purely fictional ways.

Please stop making these “corrections” immediately. They are clearly mechanical edits - if not executed by a script, they are at least executed without looking left and right. If you want to continue with these corrections, EITHER ensure that they are not “mechanical”, i.e. execute them by hand and using your brain, looking at aerial imagery, understanding where on the planet you are editing, and asking yourself if the object(s) you are changing look credible. OR if these edits are indeed made with/by a script, then provide a write-up of your “error detection” and “correction” process on the talk list so that the process can be discussed by the community like any other mechanical edit would.

I am blocking your account for a week to give you time to reflect on the issue, since past friendly reminders seem to have gone unheard.

Best regards
Frederik Ramm
OSMF Data Working Group