Contacting the user as a first step is always a good policy. In many cases, people are trying to do good, but they make mistakes along the way, especially at their first steps. It is in everybody’s interest to help them become contributing members of the community.
I suggest writing a welcoming message to the user, explaining the issues with the edit, asking what was the intended result and if he/she needs help in fixing it. If there is no reasonable response after a couple of weeks, put a revert request here.
In most cases people were willing to fix or let me fix by myself.
I tried to contact him through Open Street Map messaging 10 days ago; got no reply.
So I have two questions, one technical and one administrative.
How can I review the changesets that this user did? (I expect there to be a lot of helpful changes and a few problematic ones)
What should we do? I have changed the “highway” type on some of these ways myself in the past; if I do anything now it might be interpreted as an edit war.
Also, do we even care? A distinction between “path” and “track”, while important for me, is maybe not so important for most people?
anatoly77g,
I think the only way to review all changesets is to go one by one, I don’t see any faster way.
You can use Achavi Boomarklet to make review easier.
If you are sure that these roads are tracks - just change them back. Even wiki suggests this:
Maybe will not harm to recheck them after some time to ensure this user doesn’t make same mistake again.
Maybe it wasn’t clear from my post - these are not "track"s. There is no way a vehicle can pass there. These are hiking trails.
Actually, I daresay that one of them is the most important hiking trail in Israel!
I have tried to contact the user sivan00 about several edits, but got no answer. Since the messages were sent, the user continued to be very active editing the map, as seen in the user’s history.
The second message is about repeated degradation of data that is known to be correct.
It is similar to the degradation of data reported by anatoly77g - 1.5 months after that post.
Folks,
I’m terribly sorry if some errors were introduced as part of the modifications/corrections I have been making to OSM. Throughout my work I have encountered countless number of errors and corrected them to the best of my knowledge. If in some cases, someone thinks I made a mistake he is welcome to correct it. I the future, I will avoid correcting trails I’m not sure of, as this seems to be the main issue here.
Mistakes happen, especially if you’re new to this and that’s okay. We appreciate your enthusiasm in correcting OSM mistakes.
That said, you seem to have introduced countless misrepresentations of paths as tracks. Think of all the grief caused to people planning 4x4 trips based on OSM and getting stuck. I believe it is your responsibility, rather thand the community’s, to go over these errors and correct them one by one.
Sorry for missing this thread. I should have posted my previous reverts here. User Haim Eliezer Rogovin appears to be creating random castles. Two reverts so far.
Interestingly, they were introduced by an apparently good user with lots of good contributions. I’d advise scanning the user’s history to see if more bad nodes were pushed among the good ones.
I think the edit is probably correct, judging by Tel Aviv’s GIS system - the 2016 aerial photo shows the parking lot, but the 2017 aerial photo shows the entire stadium is now a construction site.