As a local resident in Bangkok, and a surveying contributor, let’s say I’m not happy with Grab’s editing team.
Original rant: https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=720788#p720788
As already said, Grab’s “involvement” with OSM is not brought to my attention by the announcements, but by “obvious wrongs” appearing on the area that I’m familiar with.
From their edits alone, this is what I see of Grab’s OSM team (i.e. Indian GlobalLogic company):
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They are armchair mappers.
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They are newbies.
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They are careless.
It seems that their team, comprised of people with no prior experience on OSM, made several (actually: lots of) textbook mistakes in their armchair mapping process; and they tend span their single-changeset edit on a rather large area, which is really non-conductive to audits.
To add insult to the injury, they all use a heavy-duty editing tools (JOSM) to make edits in a very fast pace, faster than any resident/patrolling OSM contributors –as few as we are– could independently audit, verify, and warn them about mistakes.
The lack of experiences (in both OSM and the area) also led them to misjudge the accuracy of imagery data; this greatly exacerbate the scale of problem, and it is not limited to Bangkok area anymore.
This doesn’t even count the accuracy issue inherent to armchair mapping (no matter how “well” they are done); these will be obvious once you look closely at each example.
In the downtown area surrounding Dusit and Phra Nakhon district in Bangkok alone, there are already ~100+ changesets waiting for me to verify after the fact. (Each of changeset is as large as a city block, some larger) Doing in-the-field verification of these are painful, and really non-productive.
Verifying them all will take years. (And guess who bear the cost of these surveys?)