What licenses are used?

Now that MapComplete is two-and-a-half year old, it’s a good time to see what license people are using to upload their images.

Why do I care?

The first reason to do this research is curiosity. How much pictures are uploaded with what license?

The second reason is a very practical and UX-driven: if a significant portion of contributors doesn’t bother to change the license, then the license picker can be moved from the ‘infobox’ into the ‘user settings’, freeing up valuable space there. User tests have pointed out that this is valuable.

Methodology

MapComplete uploads images to imgur.com and then links to this image using image=https://i.imgur.com/aBcDeF123.jpg. Some metadata (most notably the author and chosen license) is added as ‘description’ to the image on Imgur. If multiple images are added, then keys image:0, image:1, image:2… is used.

At last, themes can also add images under a specific key. For now, only the etymology-map does this with image:streetsign.

Overpass was used to download all features with a tag matching one of the described keys and matching an imgur-url.

Then, the description of all those images is downloaded and parsed, yielding the needed metadata.

Even though some people did add images to imgur to link them to OpenStreetMap before, we assume that (nearly) no images will also have the license information encoded as MapComplete does. Furthermore, this does not keep images of now-deleted features into account, nor does it take images into account that have been deleted in the mean time. I don’t think it’ll make a big difference though.

The resulting datasets are here. The script to download this all is in the MapComplete repository. Keep in mind that using this script will exhaust the daily IMGUR rate limit; so please use a different access token or spread the download over two days as was done for this research.

Results

In total, 12516 images with a parsable license were found - this is a huge amount of pictures, which I did not expect! This was done by 439 contributors in total

Unsurpisingly, the vast majority was uploaded with the default license, being CC0/public domain. This is about 10635 total pictures (or 84.9% of all pictures), taken by precisely 400 different contributors - 91.1% of contributors.

The second most popular license is the creative commons with attribution and sharealike license (CC-BY-SA), with 1707 images in total, or about 13.6% of all images. However, only 32 authors choose this license, or 7.2% of the photographers. Striking is that those are way more active, with an average of 53 images/person!

At last, the creative commons with attribution (CC-BY) is not popular at all. Only 117 pictures in total - 0.9% of all pictures - used this license. Only 10 authors picked this option, which also indicates that they are below-average in number of pictures taken with 11 images/contributor.

When the authors which used CC-BY and CC-BY-SA are summed, only 42 are found. This indicates that there is a big overlap between contributors that used the CC-BY license. Personally, I contributed under CC0 first, then a bit under CC-BY to switch to CC-BY-SA for the most part of my pictures. Other contributors probably did a similar trajectory.

Oh, and due to a bug, the license of some images got saved as "undefined" instead of the actual license. This bug only impacted 57 pictures (0.4% of all) taken by 20 authors. As we don’t know the license they took, we should stick to the most restrictive of the available licenses to reuse those images.

Averages and medians

On average, a contributor with at least one image, makes about half, namely 28.5 pictures/person! However, this is a typical power curve, with a few powerhouses that add tons of images. The median contributor with at least one image contributes two images.

Conclusion

First of all, I’m absolutely flabbergasted by the total amount of pictures taken! I knew it had to be in the thousands, but never realised it would be over 10k!

As only 42 contributors ever contributed under a different license, I feel comfortable to move the license-picker away into the user settings panel. Freeing this place will improve the experience of thousands of people at the cost of a few clicks that only a handful of people have to make - even though that this handful of people are the most active contributors.

I’m also very positively surprised by the high number of average pictures per person - even though the median is a bit more modest.

And the fact that someone has uploaded twice as much pictures then I did is really cool to. It’s also the only contributor (so far) to go over 1000 pictures and is even getting close to breaking the 2000-boundary… Congratulations, Awo!

The second place is for me (Pieter Vander Vennet), with 859 pictures added. (Damn, this much already?)

The third place is for vjyblauw, another power mapper in Belgium with 746 pictures. Congratulations as well!

At last: I’ve attachted the top 50 of contributors below.

But before showing it to you, I’d like to tell you all one more thing:

Thank you for contributing!

This wouldn’t be possible without all of you

Position	Username	Total number of pictures
1	Awo	1953
2	Pieter Vander Vennet	859
3	vjyblauw	746
4	JLZIMMERMANN	645
5	Thierry1030	622
6	L’imaginaire	589
7	Jose Luis Infante	575
8	Toni Serra	446
9	APneunzehn74	439
10	joost schouppe	310
11	Maarten O	301
12	5R-MFT	254
13	Wolfram Hoppe	250
14	Koen Rijnsent	234
15	WimBau	229
16	dentonny	212
17	Stijn Matthys	137
18	Polardfront	126
19	TauvicR	119
20	Locatus_Jori	109
21	Locatus_Raf	100
22	Robin van der Linde	98
23	wjtje	88
24	Marival	75
25	Pieter Nuytinck	71
26	Vincent Bombaerts	68
27	Rober castro	65
28	349499	58
29	Frans_Napaters	57
30	Thibaultmol	57
31	philippec	56
32	StefDeGreef	52
33	borgofumo	52
34	ClarissaWAM	48
35	jospyck	48
36	escobrice	44
37	KaiPankrath	43
38	Ninopiña10	43
39	Niels Elgaard Larsen	42
40	RodrigoKiger	41
41	MAGONA	39
42	sjokomoeske	37
43	ccasado	36
44	Piotr Barczak	34
45	lololailo	34
46	Manuel C Arco Martos	33
47	reginaldc	33
48	Hilde OSM	32
49	paunofu	32
50	Gruppe 24(2)	30