The OSM project still records around 650 new contributors each day (out of almost 5,000 registered members per day). Some countries (such as Belgium or Spain) already provide platforms to coordinate the introduction to OSM for new mappers. Others use special scripts or intense manual work to send the newly registered contributors mails with useful information (Washington or The Netherland). However, oftentimes new contributors make, as expected, beginner-mistakes. Personally, I often detect unconnected ways, wrong tags or rare fictive data. Unfortunately, sometimes (new) members also delete, intentionally or unintentionally, existing map data.

At the end of 2014, many people were anticipating the newly introduced changeset discussions feature. A few months later, I developed a page that finds the latest discussions around the world or in your country. By now, many OSM members use changeset discussions for commenting or questioning map edits of other members.

However, one year ago, almost to the day, I wrote a blog post about a webpage for detecting suspicious OSM edits. In the newly updated version, I would like to combine the aforementioned changeset discussions and comments about suspicious edits to communicate with members in a more direct way. The following image shows the revised webpage.

Furthermore you can request all changesets of a contributor, which have been commented on. The same page can also show all comments written by a selected contributor (with all comments of the particular changeset). I think the last both features are really helpful for keeping control over your own and other changeset discussions. This should also simplify the reviewing process of changesets and map edits.

As mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, some OSM groups send a welcoming e-mail to new contributors. I also saw that some mappers are welcoming new members in Taiwan with a changeset comment and information on their first changeset. Pretty neat stuff if you ask me.

Latest OSM Changeset Discussions: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions
Find Suspicious OSM Changesets: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-suspicious

Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis.