Review requests of OpenStreetMap contributors
– How you can assist! –
by Pascal Neis - Published: September 3rd, 2017
The latest version of the OpenStreetMap editor iD has a new feature: “Allow user to request feedback when saving“. This idea has been mentioned in a diary post by Joost Schouppe about “Building local mapping communities” (at that time: “#pleasereview”) in 2016. The blog post also contains some other additional and good thoughts, definitely worth reading.
However, based on the newly implemented feature, any contributor can flag her/his changeset and ask for feedback. Now it’s your turn! How can you find and support those OSM’ers?
- Step 1: Based on the “Find Suspicious OpenStreetMap Changesets” page you can search for flagged changesets, e.g. limited to your country only: Germany or UK.
- Step 2: Leave a changeset comment where you e.g. welcome the contributor and (if necessary) give her/him some feedback about the map changes. You could also add some additional information, such as links to wiki pages of tags (map features), good mapping practices, the OSM forum, OSM help or mailing lists. Based on the changeset comment other contributors can see that the original contributor of this changeset already has been provided with some feedback.
- Step 3: Finally you could create & save a feed URL of your changeset’s search. That’s it.
Personally, I really like this new feature. It provides an easy way to search for contributors who are asking for feedback about their map edits. Thanks to all iD developer’s for implementing this idea. What do you think? Should I add an extra score to “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap” where every answer to a requested feedback changeset will be counted?
Some statistics? There you go: “OSM Changesets of the last 30 Days”
Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis.
Welcoming new users is an excellent idea and a simple step that can make the community more inviting for a new contributor and increase the quality of edits to the map.
Wikipedia does this well by giving a list of helpful resources on can referrer to and people on can contact for assistance.
Those interested can also easily find changesets with a requested review for any bbox using osmcha https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSMCha#Using_OSMCha
There are already over 4k changesets waiting for feedback within a week.
While I consider the idea a (biggish) mistake, I would have nothing against being wrong on that account. So that could actually being shown, I think a tally of changesets that have the flag set and haven’t received a comment would be a good idea.
We are currently well on the way to 5’000 changesets with the flag set and I doubt if more than 1% has actually been looked at.
So far we have almost 7,000 changesets with ‘review_requested’ = ‘yes’, which have been created by 2,233 unique contributors. 1,350 of that contributors registered within the last three week (after Aug. 14th). However, at least 102 contributors received a requested comment. That means 8%, right?
Interesting, OSMCha “only* has 5,026 with the flag as of just now. With other words more than 2’000 difference … something is obviously wrong somewhere …..
Maybe to easy and of course here mentioned in the blog post, you should better look here:
https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-changesets?comment=review_requested=yes
So far: “Total number of Changesets: 7,498”
Great post, Pascal! This is very exciting.
Simon – the reason why the numbers are off is because it took over a week for us to land this feature in OSMCha – we didn’t do a backfill to process older changesets with the review tag. We may consider performing a backfill but not sure at the moment.
Thank you!
Interesting, your OSMCha database doesn’t contain all changeset tags? However, based on the above link, you can search for all changeset tags.
Cold naturally be that OSMCha missed the 1st 2’000 or so.
Biggest problem with the system is the fact that users only get notified of changeset comments via email, and not through the OSM website like user messages or an integrated reviewer interface. So some people who have requested a review may not notice they have an a changeset comment if they don’t receive or check their email…
Arun, a step by step guide on how to review review_requested=yes changesets would be really helpful.
I think it’s a good feature, but we have to see how this works out and if enough “seniors” participate.
A wish for the RSS feed: Could you add the location of the changeset to the feed? E.g. in the same way it’s done for notes “near Weisenau, Mainz, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany”