I decided to inspect the rest of the middle east, and simple overpass queries reveal a treasure trove of personal bookmarks. Do I have the green-light to exterminate them?
For instance, the following query caught 499 nodes. The vast majority is personal bookmarks.
node[tourism=guest_house]["name"~"منزل"];node[tourism=guest_house]["name"~"دار"];node[tourism=guest_house]["name"~"بيت"];
node[historic=castle]["name"~"منزل"];node[historic=castle]["name"~"دار"];node[historic=castle]["name"~"بيت"];
node[tourism=attraction]["name"~"منزل"];node[tourism=attraction]["name"~"دار"];node[tourism=attraction]["name"~"بيت"];
/* 3 variations of the word home/house */
Unlikely though it is to get a reply, I’d definitely try and contact the mappers concerned first via changeset discussion comments. If you get a case of mappers ignoring comments but keeping adding “home” locations, drop a mail to the DWG and we can send a message that they have to read before continuing mapping. That’ll stop those who have no idea what OSM even is, and at that stage it’s definitely OK to get rid of obviously dodgy MAPS.ME-entered locations (subject to the caveats discussed above about what might be a “useful” entry).
Is that procedure really necessary? There are probably thousands of personal bookmarks. Contacting them all is time-consuming and inefficient. Additionally, most of them are 1 -time Maps.Me editors. They add their home and disappear. No real need for blocking them, so contacting the DWG will consume the DWG’s time needlessly. Lastly, Maps.ME 1-timers never answer. The chance is 1 in a thousand.
On a tangent: The situation seems severe. Are there any efforts being made to make the MAPS.ME devs fix their app? In its current state, the app is doing so much damage. Simple UI changes / notices may be enough to get people to use the bookmarks rather than the map editor.
In my view, maps.me is one of the biggest causes of bad data this year.
I think they urgently need to solve the problem of the lack of effective accountability. Unfortunately the only way of doing that would probably be for one of their staff to review changeset comments on their edits that don’t get a response within, say, a week, and I doubt they would have a viable business model if they had to do that.
IMHO, not only added bad data to the database, but also show “bad” data to their users, since they are offering an advertising service to POIs, so, when you search for something, which will came first, the bests items or the sponsored ones?
I looked a bit more into this, and wow. Sorry for straying a bit off topic, but maps.me is slowly destroying the middle east. This is very serious. I assume the experienced mappers of Europe / USA have kept things in check. But there are considerably less dedicated mappers in the middle east. Overpass is not even needed, just browse a major city for a while.
Damascus, Syria. Camp sites everywhere. (some are legit but mistagged).
I’ve deleted hundreds of personal houses. But now I’m wondering:
Certain areas of the world have no addresses for various reasons. What if this is helpful for people to navigate, where names are kind of ad-hoc replacements for addresses?
Maybe I’m over-thinking this and it’s just reckless maps.me edits, but I don’t want to reduce the map usability to anyone.
I’ve decided to keep deleting. I am confident most edits are personal. And if some place is important as above, I’ll likely be contacted (or I’ll notice it’s been readded again and again or edited by different people).
I decided to create a dedicated account for QA. There’s simply too much work to be done and my main edit history was getting crowded. Maps.Me devs have to do something about this.
This forum will probably get limited attention, maybe you want to bring this up on talk mailing list, where similar maps.me issues were discussed recently.
Are we absolutely sure I should delete “X’s house”-style points and they’ll never be wanted in the future?
I’m still deleting about 10 - 100 weekly in WB/Gaza strip (I gave up on the rest of the middle east. too much work). Most them are guest_house named “X’s house” where X is some personal or family name. But I’m a bit uncomfortable with this because if sometimes in the future it’s decided they’re wanted, it would be an extremely time consuming revert.
For the record: I concluded almost all of these strange additions are in fact people all across the Middle East adding the houses of people they know (and sometimes phone numbers) as guest_houses, alpine_huts, caravans, or anything with a pretty Maps.Me icon.