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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I used to edit OSM quite a bit. It's an odd community though. Some people can get very possessive about "their" regions. I remember once spending a few hours "unbraiding" the intersections on a few major dual carriageway avenues over 20 city blocks or so, which I understand is best practice[1]. Well a day later or so, someone sent me a message very upset and demanding that I revert the changeset that ruined "their" work. I did, and it kind of turned me off from editing. Like, OK fine I won't try to help anymore, jeez.

EDIT: I don't want to dissuade anyone else from trying editing--it's fun. But, beware of the personalities, it can be like editing Wikipedia.

1: https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/3194/intersecting-d...

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Definitely agree about the community, there's all sorts! I've also encountered some very helpful individuals with immense patience.

I noticed during a large urban area mapping on HOTOSM, one person was going around teaching everyone how to map tall buildings, he'd track down each commit and comment there with feedback, it was very nicely done in a non aggressive way. I was quite happy to learn.

It isn't obvious the first time you do it, for tall buildings you need to map the part of the building that intersects with the earth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAPiGntG6fs

OSM is like a bunch of volunteers refurbing a city park, all working different schedules, with no manager. Alice starts sanding off rust on one end of a swingset. Then Bob shows up and starting painting the other end that hasn't yet been sanded; consternation ensues.

There are a lot of attempts to solve this problem with documentation on exactly how things should be done. The wiki, the stackoverflow-style help site, subreddit, tips in the editor software, mailing lists, slack... There are too many and they often don't agree. The information in some places changes quite rapidly, or in other places goes stale over time.

So we're bound to end up with incompatible approaches now and then. I've found it's often (certainly not always!) useful to politely communicate with other mappers. This works both ways -- I've stepped on toes, and I've had toes stepped on.

When you're staring at something ugly in OSM, the last person to work on it might have finished 5 minutes ago, or 5 years. But the tools to find out do exist. As the map gets more and more filled in, I expect that documentation aimed at new mappers will need to focus on communication and cooperation as much as direct editing of the map data.

It makes me wonder if individuals like these should be limited from contributing, because they force a multitude of others out of the total pool of contributors.

Maybe they're doing more damage through their obsessive behavior as compared to a larger group of less enthusiastic members.

At the extreme, people who are outright counterproductive or consistently refuse to collaborate are blocked from contributing.

There's a public log of it: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/

Edit: Comment removed, I'm an idiot, the list is paginated.

It's paginated. There's 20+ pages of multi year blocks.

(There are many instances of a single person having created multiple blocked accounts though)

Mostly it's a lot of effort to be a barely visible vandal, so people just go away.

> There are literally 20 users on that list

It lists 20 per page. The navigation is at the bottom of the page.

There's 230 pages, so that's about 4600 banned users.

Why did you revert? It would seem to me that they were in the wrong for being possessive, and assuming your efforts were in good faith, perhaps one could take delight in watching them running and squirming in anger. I would have probably just ignored the message and kept making contributions, but I understand the turn-off.

Speaking from personal experience, being a passive-aggressive asshole doesn't solve any problems.

Neither does being a doormat.

When it is about randoms on the internet I don't care enough. So I would do the same as parent poster.

Standing up for things is mentally expensive so you don't want to stand up for everything in your life, stuff on the internet is not like if someone forced into your living room.

Ignoring assholes, optionally having a laugh at them, and moving on with your life and what you want to do isn't passive-aggressive behavior.

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