Recently I encountered a CSI-style mystery. Why was the Skobbler lady (OSM
Nav based) telling people to go jump off of so many bridges? An inspection
showed that the bridges were joined to the interstate highway below, but
many interchanges otherwise had very high quality edits, with attention to
many details. So how did the people who made such skilled edits overlook
false intersections? It turns out that they didn't. A history view shows
the dreaded "Removing duplicate nodes" in the change list. The original
edit just used JOSM's un(G)lue node command, leaving the dupe nodes in
place. A perfectly valid technique until the attack of the duplicate node
bots.
Now this is all past history - I think most of the mass and uninformed
duplicate node work in the US has stopped since last year. But, like the
grumpy old man who runs outside and yells at the neighborhood kids who play
in his yard, you can bet that every time I hear the whir and clickety-clack
of anything that sounds like an OSM bot, I'll make sure that they've done
due diligence rather than just relying on only the changeset comment. But
quality bot edits are still welcome!
P.S. Don't get me started on how the dupe node bots made a 3 minute county
line road fixup into a 30 minute nightmare.
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