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Comment by willmeyers | Hacker News Reader

Really good analysis and storytelling. I wonder what the distribution looks like for joke/troll contributions on OSM and what nations or places get vandalized the most?

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Contributor of ~10 years and I have yet to be the first person to notice vandalism, as in, that it's not already been/being tackled. I've been the first to notice various mistakes (big and small), or seen the impact when large parts of the map were messed up in some big attack, and there was one case where I wasn't sure if the person had intentionally broken something or if it was some weird misunderstanding, but they never came back so... not much action to take there. Now, I'm also just a regular contributor and not someone who looks for vandalism specifically; but from my point of view, the distribution of joke/troll contributions to real ones is close to zero (c.q. infinity). Dunno why, I guess most people simply mean well?

Interesting, thanks for the reply and your contributions. This makes me happy to hear!

I'm also not a big contributor, but I haven't noticed any vandalism in the places where I map (Copenhagen, Denmark and around the west midlands of UK), but I have stumbled upon the occasional edit war where someone will be removing features like their private pond and someone will be reverting their removal.

"Dunno why, I guess most people simply mean well?"

This, but also the bar to contribute is probably too high for the common bored idiot (I know it got way easier, but they apparently don't know). Most of that group likely don't even know at all what OSM is. "Another kind of google maps?"

You can see with Wikipedia how it is when the bar to contribute is lower

People are basically good citizens, unless or until they aren't. Something like online vandalism tends to eventuate as a movement, even if a casual or arbitrary one.

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