How to handle someone deleting changes improperly [SOLVED]

I noticed today I couldn’t route properly somewhere, and then I noticed the map looked wrong. I was curious because I’d personally remapped this particular area of new construction. So I get onto OSM only to find out, someone’s deleted the changes, going solely by what appears to be Bing satellite imagery, which is horribly out of date.

Out of curiosity I looked at the user’s other changes–he’s doing the same thing to other areas of new construction in cities I’ve been to. How do we handle this?

Here’s the changeset which first caught my eye: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/55523664

I’ll have to go back there sometime and GPS trace everything and do it again. I no longer have the original GPS trace, it’s not one I uploaded.

First step, if you haven’t done it, is to put a comment on the change set letting them know what they are doing is damaging the map.

Second thing, since you have the change set number, is to see if you can get the change reverted.

I had the same thing happen to me. I had spent a week taking a few pictures of a new interchange at the intersection of Illinois 59 and Interstate 88 in Warrenville, Illinois and reading out some GPX tracks by hand and mapping the intersection by hand. Shortly afterwards someone reverted all my changes because they did not match the Bing imagery, which I had used as a basis of my mapping knowing that the Bing imagery was incorrect and knowing how the lanes had moved relative to the old intersection. I had documented that I was working from local, personal knowledge. That did not save my work. The other person thought that Bing was authoritative and superior to local, personal knowledge.

I did not bother to duplicate that effort. By the time that I noticed that Bing had updated, someone else remapped the intersection correctly.

How does one seek to revert changesets?

The other issue with this person, according to his profile, he doesn’t even live in this country, but he’s making similar changes all over the globe through OSM. Maybe he’s got personal knowledge, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t just log in to a German map and start making things look like satellite imagery, once people have recently made changes to it. He’s damaging a lot.

Just the few things he’s done to the area I’ve been mapping, it’s a lot, tens of hours of work by myself, much less others. I’d probably deck the guy if I knew him personally.

I’ve similar things happen before. A guy in California recently undid some of my work in order to get revenge on me for an argument over the miss labeling of a nature reserve last year. It can be pretty frustrating. I just decided to let it go and map other places for now. There’s a guide on the OSM Wikipage about how to revert changes here https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Change_rollback and there’s also a discussion on how to do it here https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/731/how-can-i-revert-a-changeset I think it can be done with JOSM and Potlatch. Its particularly frustrating when someone from another country modifies other peoples work, let alone someone living here. So hopefully the person that it to you can be dealt with and won’t do it again.

Has you can see from his user name, which ends on _telenav, he’s an employee of Telenav. This company uses OSM data for their navigation program. Their data-group is located in Romania and indeed edit all over the world.

They should know better. Just revert the changeset.

Edit: I had this guy’s email address lying around, so I contacted him privately with link to this thread the and changeset and asked him to revert it ASAP.

Hey guys,
It was my edit there, sorry for the inconvenience. I reverted change set, and now it’s back there. If you find any problems, please let me know and I’ll try to fix them as soon as possible.

Thanks for the community support, and thanks to hoream for reverting changesets. I will still get the new GPX files uploaded soon.

Just a heads up, almost everything you see in this map area here, is under new road construction, so the satellite imagery will not match in many cases. Please, if possible, refrain from making changes unless you have GPX tracing or have personally visited the location: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/36.9374/-76.3079

Just ran into another situation where hoream_telenav modified a road: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/55763050#map=16/36.9277/-76.3129&layers=G

@taz2015 Actually, that edit was by a different user (although both work for Telenav), so they may not be aware of your previous conversation.

I have started to leave an empty way located where the old imagery makes it temptingly look like a road or building should be, along with a note stating that Bing xxxx imagery is out of date. That has worked for me so far.