OpenStreetMap
The moderation queue. The first 3000 issues
Posted by mavl on 1 March 2020 in English. Last updated on 2 March 2020.OpenStreetMap contains more than 7500 issues now. An information about 3000 issues (and 4585 reports) is shown here.
Issues and reports
The OpenStreetMap users send the reports and OSM website creates the issues. One issue may contain several reports. When a user sends a report, OSM website may create a new issue (if so issue does not exist yet) or reopen an old issue (if so issue exists already).
The issue #1 was created on 2018-06-16. The issue #3000 was created on 2019-04-27. So an average speed is 3000/316 = 9.5 (issues/day) and 4585/316 = 14.5 reports/day.
Also there are:
1360/599 = 2.3 reports/issue (for diary entries)
93/56 = 1.7 reports/issue (for diary comments)
2239/1527 = 1.5 reports/issue (for users)
893/818 = 1.1 reports/issue (for notes)
4585/3000 = 1.5 reports/issue (for all)
Statuses of issues
The issue may have the status:
- open;
- resolved;
- ignored.
An analysis of issue statuses helps to estimate approximately a ratio of real and insignificant problems.
A classic example is the useless map notes. People don’t want to resolve the useless map notes. A user sees a map note that contains the comment “Test”. This contributor can add new comment “This is a useless map note” and resolve so note, but the user send a report to the moderation queue. The issues about the useless map notes have the status “Ignored” often (but a moderator may resolve the map note or send the private message to the user “You may resolve the map note simply and this note will disappear from the map in 7 days”).
Languages of reports
The English language is a champion at the moderation queue. The users from different countries (Germany, France, Russia and others) use English usually.
For example, 3 languages were used to report about the diary comments: English, German, Russian.
6 languages were used to report about the diary entries: English, Russian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, French.
Sometimes the language of the report is unknown. For example, if the text of the report contains:
“?”
“.”
“sp”
“https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/19”
24 languages were used to report about the map notes: English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Italian, Indonesian, Polish, Chinese, Korean, Dutch, Persian, Vietnamese, Turkish, Finnish, Thai, Sotho, Greek, Javanese, Albanian, Catalan, Romanian.
Hyperlinks
GSoC’15 Project update
The moderation queue. The first 1000 issues
Discussion
Comment from Andy Allan on 2 March 2020 at 14:43
Thanks for reporting on these statistics! It’s nice to see the feature is proving useful, but of course it would be even nicer if it was unnecessary.
Based on your analysis, what changes to the issues and reports would be the most useful?
Comment from mavl on 2 March 2020 at 15:31
I’m glad if it was interesting. I don’t see a way to improve the moderation queue. This is a convenient subsystem.
if community wants then we could add changesets and changeset comments to reported items.
Comment from woodpeck on 2 March 2020 at 16:11
Biggest issue is probably the fact that especially non-English-speaking users liberally apply the categories “abusive”, “threat”, and “offensive” to things like “someone has placed this business in the wrong location”. There are probably translation issues that stem from these words being translated without context.
Another problem that I might have mentioned in the past is that it is not possible to write a reply from within the issue workflow; the most frequently occurring misunderstanding - someone “reporting” an useless note instead of simply closing it themselves - therefore requires 1. write comment, 2. mark issue as resolved, 3. click in reporter’s user name then click on “send message” then send a message that starts “dear so-and-so, regarding the report you made on note, so-and-so, please understand that you can simply resolve these notes…”, a process that again is fraught with translation issues because when I write that they can “click on resolve” of course I don’t know what the button will be named in their UI. This could be simplified a little if there were a checkbox “also send a message to the complainant” or so when you submit a comment.
The giant issue for DWG is of course that the whole thing is not integrated with OTRS, so the workflow for any non-trivial tickets for us is 1. manually open ticket in OTRS, 2. copy issue text to OTRS ticket, 3. write comment with link to OTRS ticket, 4. mark issue as resolved, 5. if we need to contact the person who raised the ticket, send a personal message within OSM, add a “note” to the ticket in OTRS, copy the message text onto the ticket, and so on (copy potential replies as well). This could be improved if a temporary email address was generated for every complainant and person complained about and these were visible on the issue page; it would then at least be possible to directly send messages to these users from within OTRS. Ideally of course issues would directly be opened in OTRS instead of on OSM. OTRS has an API than can do that.
Comment from Anton Khorev on 11 March 2020 at 08:45
People often report each other as “vandals” if they have disagreements how to map something. If I’m in edit war with someone, what are my reporting options? I have to report the user and then select a reason. The selectable reasons are:
There needs to be another option that corresponds to “User Dispute” DWG queue. And another one for “Poor mapping”.