„Nominal Members“ of OSM?
by Pascal Neis - Published: August 20th, 2010
There has been an exciting question on the German OSM mailing list yesterday (here). To clarify this question a little to the readers of this blog, the OSM member basically asked if anybody knows how many users ever really worked on a single note in OSM at all, and how many so called “nominal members” (members that never touched any node in OSM) can be found in OSM?
It sounded interesting to me, so I started working on a way to figure out the numbers. My results showed that the entire OSM planet file (dated 08/18/2010) has about 735 million nodes that have been provided by about 93.000 OSM members. 60 million ways were mapped by 68.000 members and about 10.000 members were involved with the creation of almost 690.000 relations. The history of the objects could not be considered during the analysis! In total there were about 98.000 members that contributed to the OSM database.
However, these numbers still show an interesting result considering the actual amount of 290.000 registered OSM members. So the question remains if there are a lot of members in OSM who are still standing in the waiting line and will start with their first edits pretty soon?
To see what the numbers looked like one year ago, I changed the tool that I created one more time and repeated the analysis with the planet file of 08/19/2009. I received the following results: At the given time there were about 412 million nodes provided by 49.000 members in the database. 32 million ways were mapped by 41.000 members and about 6.000 members were involved with the creation of almost 180.000 relations.
This means that one year ago all OSM data has been provided by 51.000 members although there were about 145.000 members registered. Thus, in the year 2009 about 35% of registered members did at least one edit on the OSM database. This number does not really change with the latest OSM dataset, with 290.000 registered members and about 98.000 members with at least one edit which represent about 34%!
To give a better overview, here are even more numbers for the year 2008: 253 million nodes provided by 15.000 members. 20 million ways mapped by almost 14.000 members and about 16.000 relations created by 1.600 members. In total there were about 16.000 members that contributed to the OSM database, while there were about 55.000 members registered. Thus, the percentage of active registered members lies around 29%.
In general the remaining question is: What happened to the other 65% that registered for the project but did not contribute to it? Is it too hard or too complicated to contribute to the project? Did those members just collect data for a short period of time? Is that why they do not show up in the analysis shown above?
thx @ Dennis for helping me with the translation!
Very interesting figures. However, for the license change it would be interesting too understand if the figure on the table (12.500 users have done 98% of all edits) is correct.
Frederick Ramm was questioning the figure as he assumed that “historic edits” were neglected when counting (meaning that current data are derived from “old” nodes and ways, which also require re-licensing).
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Pascal Neis, Oliver. Oliver said: Two thirds of the registered users in OpenStreetMap do not make a single edit via @pascal_n http://bit.ly/da8xGU #osm […]
Slide 15 on my BCS slides has a nice graph Matt knocked up for me, showing the long-tale shape of the community. (also shown here, but to me this feels upside-down)
By making tools and documentation easier we’re helping move move people up the curve, but also attracting new people join onto the long tail, so I don’t think we’ll ever change the shape of the curve.
But yes it’s always surprising the number of registered users we have, who have not progressed to clicking the ‘save’ button. I imagine many of them just wanted to see what the Potlatch editor looked like, or maybe they fully intended to map something but then chickened out.
One interesting thing is that we have an email address for all these people. We could email them all, with a message to try to entice them back. We need a carefully crafted message, and perhaps carefully timing too. e.g. Send it when the new Potlatch 2 editor is ready for prime-time, after it’s bedded in and stable, and then mention this in the email. I think we should do it, but only once. Nobody wants to receive more than one email from some old website they once signed up for. This means we only have one shot at getting the message right.
Nice Analysis.
I have in the past done some similar (although more limited) analysis. However, rather than doing it on the planet file, I have done it on the change-set file, thus taking “history” into account.
Doing that, I get 130588 accounts have contributed at least one changeset to OSM. (This excludes anonymous accounts, as they won’t appear). So it is a little higher than your 98.000 looking at the current planet, but not that substantially different and still only about 40% ever contribute.
To get a feeling for the 12.000 users contributing 98% of the data, I made a list of the top 1000 contributors. http://apmon.dev.openstreetmap.org/TopChangesetContributor.txt shows the top 1000, by number of changesets (disregarding if a changeset contained 1 or 50000 Nodes) If size of changeset taken into account, then the top 1000 contributors by “objects touched” are http://apmon.dev.openstreetmap.org/TopChangeContributor.txt
The top change contributors are unsurprisingly all bots and large imports
As an alternative to the account number account that shows the nice “exponential curve”, I have made a graph ( http://apmon.dev.openstreetmap.org/osm-new-accounts.eps ) that shows the number of new new accounts per week doing there first edit / changeset. Showing a steady increase in 2007 – 2008, then a large increase mid 2009 and since then somewhat of a decline in numbers of new contributors.
@Apmon
Please, could you tell us a little bit more about how you get to a number of “130588” accounts that have contributed ?
Hmpf, I made a new analysis on an OSM History Dump (http://planet.openstreetmap.org/full-experimental/) and I come not to a number of 130k …
@pascal. I simply downloaded the changeset file ( http://planet.openstreetmap.org/changesets-latest.osm.bz2 ) and counted the distinct user-ids present in that file. The top contributor graphs are also derived from the changeset file. Of cause, there might be a software bug in my code, but the number at least sounds fairly plausible.
How many users did you get from the full experimental? If it is off by a couple of thousand, then it may well simply be due to the difference in time from when the data is. The week after, I got something like 131k so over 1000 users more. (Which corresponds nicely with the osm-new-accounts analysis, that shows between 1000 and 2000 new contributors per week since about a year)
@apmon
http://neis-one.org/2010/09/04/%E2%80%9Enominal-members%E2%80%9C-of-osm-ii/
Hi,
I came on this page from http://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/1022/what-are-the-most-common-mapping-mistakes-that-other-users-make
Where are listed the most commons errors people are making on OSM.
This item is referenced quite high on the “Help” section of OSM, and I came there because I was looking to contribute after seeing some obvious errors around my location.
I don’t have much time, don’t know how to contribute yet (that’s why I went on the help page in the first place) and don’t even have GPS yet.
So, if I did not read this “Help” message, it might well have been that I openned an account and never found the time or resources to contribute, so committing the second worse error an user of OSM can commit.
Now that I understand that, I’ll avoiding this error by simply not registering.
Yannick
Dear Yannick,
you are more than welcome to contribute to the OpenStreetMap project. Actually, you can find a good giude here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Beginners%27_guide
If you have any further questions the OSM community will be happy to help you out via any of the popular mailing lists, maybe you find your country here: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/
Thanks for your kind answer, I didn’t replied as first waiting for another point of view…
But I already got that message “more than welcome to contribute to the OpenStreetMap project”, it’s even reminded on the “Not Mapping!” item (“Please all you people. Have a go at mapping! Make mistakes. We don’t mind.”).
What is however still said, is that registering, and, for some reason, *not* contributing, is still one of the biggest error one can commit (the third one). So that one that is not *sure* he’ll be able to contribute has better not to register (better than risking to be the shameful one).
I would like to have replied on the forum page itself, but I cant (as not being registered), that’s why I came here from a link on it.
What I want to say, is that, if you mind, this forum entry can refrain people to register, as soon as they are, like me, not sure they will be able (technically or other) to contribute. However, I would be surprised that all those people that registered without ever contributing (for very various reason ranking from registering for fun to dying before first commit) are such a burden to the project that they have to be discouraged.
Yannick
Is it possible to make that “Beginners’ guide” easier to find? I’ve wasted several hours this week looking for something like that, and was on the verge of giving up on OSM before making a single edit! I’m sure I’m not alone.
Now that I know what I’m looking for, I do see that the Beginners’ guide is linked from the main page of the wiki, which is in turn linked from the map sidebar. But the link to the wiki is marked “Documentation”, which I expected to be technical specifications and such. I’ve been looking in the “Help Centre” (found my way here from the same post Yannick mentioned) and getting increasingly frustrated.
Perhaps these could be more clearly indicated on the map sidebar?
[…] Roughly 70% of visitors who open an account do not go on to make a single edit to OpenStreetMap. Why do the majority of people interested in editing OSM fail to add data? Is the user experience not good enough? What are some specific issues that stop contributions? These are some of the questions that I, together with Dr Kate Jones, are currently investigating through an in-depth OpenStreetMap usability study, which will be presented at the upcoming SOTM-EU conference. […]
I have tried editing, see a picture of the small town I edited, but have yet to see the edits on the common map. I found this blog through the “help section” error posting as well. A how to section would be nice.