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How does OSM prevent trolling or vandalism? Since many (most) courier companies rely on OSM for their database a bad "joke" could prove very frustrating to many

How does OSM prevent trolling or vandalism? Since many (most) courier companies rely on OSM for their database a bad "joke" could prove very frustrating to many people.

maxerickson 4d ago
The main method of prevention is blocks on users that make malicious edits. Obviously that doesn't prevent all malicious edits. The larger users of the data are doing some degree of validation of changes before showing them to users.
mpol 4d ago
Just like Wikipedia, people follow changes. If there is vandalism, it often gets reverted within a few hours. If there's a mistake (relation broken for example) it can take a few hours longer to fix.
speedgoose 4d ago
I once encountered a joke building that was so large, I remember in the magnitude of 500km2, that you couldn’t edit it in the web editor. You had to download a desktop application to delete it. It was in a place of the world that is unlikely to be popular within the OSM community.
- sellyme 4d ago
  Fortunately it's fairly easy to query the database for that kind of thing and a few editors periodically go through the most implausibly-sized common features, so anything too egregious will get noticed eventually. The last time I saw a collection of "biggest objects" for various tags it was mostly things that were just subtly mistagged (e.g., an entire forest being tagged as a single tree) rather than vandalism.
  - yellowapple 4d ago
    > e.g., an entire forest being tagged as a single tree If that forest's dominant tree happens to be a quaking aspen then technically speaking it might not have been mistagged. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)
Quothling 4d ago
Others have gotten into how OSM fights vandalism, but I can tell you a little about what it is like to consume the data. About a decade ago I was in the public sector and we wanted to switch from google maps to OSM in our route calculation tool for the Danish travel-to-work tax deduction (translated). Initially we didn't change how the app worked, so we paid some organisation for an api access which worked similar to how a google maps api work. After a year or so we eventually rebuild the engine to keep a local copy of OSM where we had our GIS team do incremental and reviewed updates. This was not because of vandalism, but because of how hard it was to update OSM when you don't do it often and might not look trustworthy. In Danish cities we have a complicated relationship with cars, we don't want them, but we do want the people they bring. One of the obstacles we create is having a lot of one way streets, and when OSM gets an error on those... well... suddenly there is a lot of addresses you simply can't reach. I once updated one of these errors with a photo from the internet, and it was rejected after a few miniutes because I had used an image from the internet which is (was?) against the TOS. Unfortunately the company we bought the API from was not doing any form of validation, so we had a week where our 5000 employess couldn't registerer driving to the most commonly used adress in the neighbouring city. I posted all sorts of documentation proving my official function, and had a discussion with the admins and even though they agreed I was right they refused to let me correct the mistake without real evidence. So eventually I drove my bicycle the 50km to the location, took some pictures and a couple with silly hats and submitted them and got my correction. Once we had a local copy of the danish map we had no issues. I assume you would do this for any app relying on working routing data.

How does OSM prevent trolling or vandalism? Since many (most) courier companies rely on OSM for their database a bad "joke" could prove very frustrating to many people.

maxerickson 4d ago

The main method of prevention is blocks on users that make malicious edits. Obviously that doesn't prevent all malicious edits. The larger users of the data are doing some degree of validation of changes before showing them to users.

mpol 4d ago

Just like Wikipedia, people follow changes. If there is vandalism, it often gets reverted within a few hours. If there's a mistake (relation broken for example) it can take a few hours longer to fix.

speedgoose 4d ago

I once encountered a joke building that was so large, I remember in the magnitude of 500km2, that you couldn’t edit it in the web editor. You had to download a desktop application to delete it. It was in a place of the world that is unlikely to be popular within the OSM community.

sellyme 4d ago
Fortunately it's fairly easy to query the database for that kind of thing and a few editors periodically go through the most implausibly-sized common features, so anything too egregious will get noticed eventually. The last time I saw a collection of "biggest objects" for various tags it was mostly things that were just subtly mistagged (e.g., an entire forest being tagged as a single tree) rather than vandalism.
- yellowapple 4d ago
  > e.g., an entire forest being tagged as a single tree If that forest's dominant tree happens to be a quaking aspen then technically speaking it might not have been mistagged. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

Quothling 4d ago

Others have gotten into how OSM fights vandalism, but I can tell you a little about what it is like to consume the data. About a decade ago I was in the public sector and we wanted to switch from google maps to OSM in our route calculation tool for the Danish travel-to-work tax deduction (translated). Initially we didn't change how the app worked, so we paid some organisation for an api access which worked similar to how a google maps api work. After a year or so we eventually rebuild the engine to keep a local copy of OSM where we had our GIS team do incremental and reviewed updates. This was not because of vandalism, but because of how hard it was to update OSM when you don't do it often and might not look trustworthy. In Danish cities we have a complicated relationship with cars, we don't want them, but we do want the people they bring. One of the obstacles we create is having a lot of one way streets, and when OSM gets an error on those... well... suddenly there is a lot of addresses you simply can't reach. I once updated one of these errors with a photo from the internet, and it was rejected after a few miniutes because I had used an image from the internet which is (was?) against the TOS. Unfortunately the company we bought the API from was not doing any form of validation, so we had a week where our 5000 employess couldn't registerer driving to the most commonly used adress in the neighbouring city. I posted all sorts of documentation proving my official function, and had a discussion with the admins and even though they agreed I was right they refused to let me correct the mistake without real evidence. So eventually I drove my bicycle the 50km to the location, took some pictures and a couple with silly hats and submitted them and got my correction. Once we had a local copy of the danish map we had no issues. I assume you would do this for any app relying on working routing data.