Comment by moksly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moksly | Hacker News Reader

Has bug-correcting editing improved over the years? We use OSM quite a bit in the public sector because they aren’t snooping. Three years ago one of our internal routing systems broke because someone had reported the street leading up to our administration center as a one-way street in the wrong direction.

This meant our 7000 employees couldn’t get compensation for any work related driving, and we couldn’t submit the correct tax-records.

When I submitted my correct edit, I was banned because my account was new and I had submitted a evidence from our internal street planning system, where we mapped the direction of the street, which is proprietary to us. Heh, it took two weeks to get it fixed after that because every subsequent edit got denied. Which felt kind of silly, considering it was my department who decided the street should become a one way street in the first place. Really needed a “verified” account system.

Considering I haven’t needed to correct anything since is a testament to its quality though.

Puzzled by this. It's really really unlikely that you got a ban for one editing error. You can see the list of blocks at https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks and actual bans are only imposed for _repeated_ vandalism, edit-warring or copyright infringement. Short-term user blocks are generally imposed if the user isn't responding to attempts to contact them.

Do you have a link for your changeset and what happened?

Wow, the documents for the user blocks are very thorough. Here is a fun snippet that (blocked) user sorein sent to the OSM Data Working Group:

"YOU MORON WHO PROMISED T INTERMEDIATE BETWEEN ME AND THE GYPSIES TAKING OVER IN THE ROMANIAN NEWSLETTER, AND THEN YOU JUST RUDELY FORGOT NEED TO STOP!!! GO DO A JOB FOR WHICH YOU ARTE QUALIFIED"

It sounds like some kind of checkpoint/release system for the map could have saved you there. For example, you set your system to use the 2019-01 epoch of the map or whatever, you'll be guaranteed to not have any surprise changes until next time you update checkpoint.

Couldn't you have just tried contacting the editor who reversed your edit? I have had only one issue ever since (effed up a public transport relation - that got sorted out by mail, and now we're friends in real life), but my account is also almost a decade old now.

That seems like copyright problem, which is really important.

Yes, maybe moksly gave a link to a non-free system. Given that it is their workplace they could just have commented "local knowledge" or referred to images they had put on e.g., Mapillary.

> banned because my account was new and I had submitted a evidence from our internal street planning system, where we mapped the direction of the street, which is proprietary to us

This sounds like a copyright issue. OSM is not accepting copyrighted data on incompatible licenses.

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