Hi all, I was looking around China and saw a ton (thousands of changesets) of edits by user jamesks (http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/jamesks)
He seems to be using something called Tracks2OSM, adding lots and lots of GPS tracks of roads. I'm not sure where they're from or if he has the license and permission to use them. He doesn't seem to be doing the driving himself, he appears to be in Edinburgh, and the edits are all over China. His OSM profile mentions something about "exploring library sources" in relation to OSM too, which worries me. In addition, there seem to be lots of types of errors the edits are introducing. For example, in some cases the edits don’t seem to match any imagery. There were also edits where he added some small segments that didn’t connect to existing nearby roads ( https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/389407131#map=18/28.17541/113.02284), or where the whole road was clearly visible in imagery but he only added part of it, so there are little chunks of road in the middle of the map that aren’t connected to anything else ( http://www.openstreetmap.org/edit?way=330377876#map=15/28.8582/104.7145). And sometimes he changed the road type frequently along the route but I didn’t see why, they all looked the same to me. Also, he was adding name=FIXME to roads, when the better tag would be fixme= and then an explanation of what he did and what needs to be fixed. There may be others too -- he has a huge number of edits. He appears to be in Edinburgh, Scotland (at least, doing some Googling If found a Twitter with the same username and avatar), maybe someone knows him there? He seems to be very active but I'm worried he's importing or using some kind of automation or tools without being careful or understanding the problems with licensing and such. I sent him a message on OSM too to ask about it, nicely, citing the types of problems above. Will let you know what I hear. Thanks! Andrew
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