Given what I've observed and heard about from other mappers, I am not particularly surprised to hear that the DWG has been getting complaints (although I have not filed a complaint myself). I think it's helpful to talk about the general problem, separately from any identities.
My impression is that a fair part of the genesis of the issue is disagreement about tagging highways. We have an established, older view that primary is for US highways or roads that are as important culturally, secondary is for state highways or roads of similar importance, and tertiary for roads that are less important than secondary but that form a key part of the interconnecting grid (between towns, across cities). There is another view which promotes labeling roads at higher classifications. Given that, I think there are two problems that arise in terms of how people collaborate (or not) on how to improve the map. OSM is fundamentally a group effort and how people feel about their participation and interaction with others is very important for the health of the project. First, there's the notion that the local mappers should have priority in deciding how things should be tagged. I don't mean that one shouldn't make non-local edits - I do that after visiting places. But I don't make edits that I think a local might object to. When I see something done by a local mapper that I think should be different, I message them and ask about it (and sometimes go ahead if I don't hear back). I've met a fair number of the active people in Massachusetts in person, and talked with several others in email. We confer among ourselves sometimes, and have in the past discussed issues with non-local mappers adjusting tagging. We also had the "highway=path foot=designated vs highway=footway" discussion over beer, pleasantly (regarding differing choices among local mappers, which I am quite sure DWG never heard complaints about). Second, there's a slippery slope to what "edit war" means. Generally, it takes two to have an edit war, and for that to happen, both have to be willing to keep making the change, which is a combination of doing that even though they should realize it's getting to edit war, and caring enough to put energy into it, instead of deciding to focus on other hobbies. So if there's a disagreement, and the results lopsidedly reflect one user's view just because that user is far more insistent on making changes and arguing about them, that's a bad outcome, and in my mind just as bad as an edit war if not worse, just less obvious. So overall, I would say that if user A complains about user B making non-local objectionable changes, and that's the only complaint, then it's really hard to tell. It could be that the non-local user in some cases is right in a sense (consider bringing a jury of 6 seasoned mappers to the area for a survey and pub discussion about what they'd do, and see how that comes out). Many of these calls are not particularly important in the grand scheme of things; local users feeling like someone far away is being pushy has a bigger impact on the project. On the other hand, If 20 users (not acting in concert) all complain similarly about B, then there really is a problem -- most people don't want to complain to authority in a group like osm, so if 20 complain probably 100 feel that way. Reasonable people, more or less by definition, do not provoke complaints by large numbers of other reasonable people. A serious concern is people being driven away because they find participating in the community unpleasant; this is the concept in open source of "poisonous people". I've certainly run into this a bit in openstreetmap. In the open source world (I participate in NetBSD), it seems that people who know each other in person are much more likely to be reasonable on the net. The local group concept helps greatly, but it doesn't address the distant armchair editor (especially if that person isn't part of his or her in-person community). All that said, it's not clear that the DWG is the right group. But I think OSM needs a body of elders (who have the respect of the community as reasonable and fair people) to deal with complaints of behavior that doesn't meet community interaction norms. I certainly don't want to endorse some sort of global thought police, and would want such an authority to tread lightly. But the fact that the DWG is moved to write to talk-us "has had a high number of complaints about a small number of mappers" indicates to me that we have a significant social problem, and as I see it DWG is the least inappropriate WG to handle it. Greg (osm user gdt)
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