Lots of Mess uploaded to Israeli West Bank map

Hello folks,

Did you noticed that the user Metehyi imported lots of bulk data from GeoNames of our area? He uploaded it in many cangesets in the last 4 days. The data covers all of the West Bank and more places in Israel. The problem is this data contains places are not exist (some was never exist and some was abandoned or destroyed years ago - for example: the villages in the Latrun Enclave). Additionally, it contains tags that are not match (like a wadi got a “hamlet” tag). And the last thing that annoys me personally - places that are totally not found in “Palestine”, and will never be, got a tag “is_in:Palestine,فلسطين”.

My question is what we sould do with it: keep it messy like it is, trying to fix it (what seem to me not possible), or revert it all back and let Metehyi improve accuracy and then upload the data again?

Eliot Massri

Some of this could have been useful, deserted Palestinian villages could be marked as ruins. Unfortunately, most of the coordinates are off by hundreds of meters. So the whole thing is useless. We should explain this to the user and revert.
If it’s politically motivated it could escalate to an edit war that would require intervention by arbitrators.

So…

  1. Metehyi got a message about this discussion, and asked to reply.
  2. I found another problem: there are many places appeared twice.
  3. I also hope this all thing will not escalate to edit war (but hope all of our wars will be of this kind :slight_smile: )
  4. And the obvious question: when should we revert those edits?