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For me this discussion is new, so I don't have good answers to these questions. One thing that happened when Pokemon Go got popular is that people (users) were
by mpol 6y ago
For me this discussion is new, so I don't have good answers to these questions.
One thing that happened when Pokemon Go got popular is that people (users) were conducting vandalism, in the sense that many pokemon figures were added to the main map of OSM. People have to work really hard to remove these, and they might burn out on this. There is already a lot of vandalism, like people adding their friends drinking shed, or whatever they think of as funny.
Another thing that already happens with volunteers, is people thinking their working area is "their area", while no such concept exists. This can already give a lot of friction among volunteers. I can imagine if billions in money are at stake, big companies with a massive crowd of emplyees might want to really grab those working areas and drown out volunteers. If that gets a big problem, volunteers that were active for years might drop out.
- mpol 6y agoOh, one other thing. Many volunteers are maintaining and guarding hiking routes and cycling routes. These get damaged easily (I just did that yesterday myself) and these volunteers sometimes carry a big burden. The big companies don't have an interest in these routes "by the people, for the people", there is no money in that. If they get more often damaged, it will not be regarded as funny by these important long-lasting volunteers.
- abcanthur 6y agoIs this virtual or real damage? As in, the trail route is imperfect and misleading about the actual trail, or the trail is revealed via the map and others come and physical use damages the trail. The second reminds me of land owners sneakily putting "no trespassing" on land that is legally publicly accessible (I think this happened in Sausalito about a year ago)
- mpol 6y agoThere might be many situations, but I was mostly talking about virtual vandalism. When you edit points, lines or routes in the wrong way, they get damaged. The volunteers guarding these need to fix them themselves, which can be a burden and they can get emotional already. You can imagine how that goes when more damage gets done where the fixing is left for those volunteers. I don't know much about land-owners doing vandalism, often people try to communicate, sometimes this works out okay.
- c0nsumer 6y agoIt's often as simple as mis-tagging. I do a lot of mapping of mountain bike trails (think narrow, hiking-type trails which are also open to bikes) and these are designated as paths (highway=path), open to cycles (bicycle=yes or bicycle=designated) and some mountain biking-specific tags. What'll often happen is a well-meaning person will come by, often using an editor that doesn't differentiate between types of bicycling, and change the route to be tagged highway=cycleway. This is the tag for things like paved bike paths, such as urban cycling infrastructure. The result is now these mountain bike trails, narrow/rocky/tight/steep stuff, shows up in tools that offer bike commuters directions. Just... not great. So many of us keep an eye on the stuff in our area to see that the tags stay as they should.
- pcthrowaway 6y agoIs this really such a problem? I guess this is my first time hearing of it, but I believe OSM allows you to mark areas where public wifi (or private wifi, in the case of businesses that provide wifi to customers), is available. Wifi access is not a tangible, physical thing (even though of course the physical layer is), but OSM provides a framework to map it because it's tied to a location, and the information might be useful to some people.
- mpol 6y agoI am not sure what you are replying to, so I assume there is some miscommunication. I don't know anything about mapping public Wifi access, like in shopping centres. What I meant is that already some people feel like their city and a 30km radius around it is "their area" and they want to control what and how things get mapped there. It can lead to heated and emotional discussions, we are people after all :) If a big company with lots of human resources would do this, there is hardly any fighting back.
- pcthrowaway 6y agoI was replying to the Pokemon capture points added to OSM being considered vandalism.
- spaethnl 6y agoI think the issue was that Pokemon Go used certain types of map elements as their Pokemon capture points, e.g., Landmarks, or something. People weren't adding "Pokemon capture points", they were adding non-existent Landmarks so that they could be imported to the game for their own advantage.
- pcthrowaway 6y agoAhh, thanks for explaining. That's definitely an abuse of the service