Hi, On 5 August 2010 17:09, Andy Allan <gravityst...@gmail.com> wrote: > Let's imagine nearmap have been running their new editor and > 'cloaking' all their users under the one account for a couple of > years, and that their editor is great and everyone wants to use it. > > * I want to run a mapping party in Sydney - who's been editing in the > area? Ah, "nearmap". How many other people are there beyond just me? I > can't find out.
But (as I mentioned in this thread) you usually look just at the last user editing every feature because the OSM XML for some reason includes this little bit of redundancy by putting the last editor's user name (historical data actually) in non-history extracts. This is not ideal, there may have been a big edit in the area removing created_by tags for example so the last editor's name tells you nothing. Or the last editor may have just changed their user name (so you need user id instead). So you need to look at full history anyway, at which point you can identify the users behind the nearmap account because Ben said changesets are tagged. It's not a cloak, it's a different way to store user identities. And IMHO it's completely justified considering most users will just have a single or a couple of simple edits (assuming what Ben said about the _simple_ editor is true), I imagine anyone who wants to start contributing regularly will be motivated enough to find out about the OSM project behind the map, and perhaps register directly. Cheers _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
