a bit of exaggeration makes sure that they don’t try to pull of bigger shenanigans (and it helps to get some attention :) )

Do you know the story of the boy who cried wolf?

This is not a productive mentality, “just scream harder each time and hope ‘they’ listen”.

Alarmism when there’s nothing seriously going on – seeing as the user got blocked already – just leads to apathy with the next “osm in trouble” headline. I already had it this time, probably the general public who’s not invested in OSM cares even less. I’m not sure if this type of content (goes viral on its own) might be more risky than Microsoft trying to attract more contributors (which we can block if appropriate, and if not appropriate: good ODbL contributions are super valuable). I’d say let’s monitor these things for a few days, see what kind of edits come in and if we can work with the contributor facilitator if something is wrong, before crying wolf.

That’s quite useful, thank you!

5cm imagery, that’s amazing! Just a few days ago I was trying to map an area in Germany, where there was only satellite imagery available (~45cm) and I had such a hard time telling roofs from streets, let alone find power grid features. No pandemic can stop us with this level of detail :)

Many thanks to Enedis for the contribution and OpenStreetMap France for arranging this!

Same! The edit I did to try and get the milestone edit was actually in South America, near a city where a good friend lives. But an OSM Award nominee and non-western edit is of course even better :)

As a hacker (in the broad sense of the word), automating things is the expected route for me. I’m surprised so many people feel like that would have been cheating or boring (“may the best script win” is what I’m used to and people fight tooth and nail to get on pixelfluts!). Not that I disagree or don’t understand, it just both surprises me that nobody automated it and that people seem to near-universally feel this way. That’s good to keep in mind for the next milestone and makes me glad I wasn’t well prepared, now it was all equal :)

To monitor the changeset count and make my own attempt at getting the hundred millionth changeset, …

So what ever happened to this?

My changeset ended up being number 99 999 991. I overestimated how many people would be going for it.

The numbers tell me that some hundred people tried, which I guess is quite a lot if each of them aim for a single number (being at ‘991 is not so bad for a semi-unprepared attempt methinks!). I also saw the numbers starting to speed up after we hit 99 999 900, but I sat tight until the moment that I had planned (hitting submit after ‘983). Alas, it still landed early. I really thought at least a few persons would have tried to script it and would be submitting a sufficient number that my request would be competing for HTTP processing time and, thus, that it would make sense to try to submit (by hand) around 17 changesets before the hundred millionth, but that does not seem to have been the case :)

Our approach toward creating the Daylight Map Distribution was inspired by the success of [Linux]: […] user demand along with a liberal software license led to an explosion of ”distros,” curated collections of software that could be readily installed by casual users.

This is a convincing argument for the Daylight distribution (Linux distros are definitely a good thing) but the difference is that, for Linux distros, it is clear what the rules are. Debian has clear rules for how to include things; Ubuntu builds on Debian and adds/removes some things they like/don’t like; Linux Mint builds again on Ubuntu and removes things like tracking that is (was?) present in Ubuntu (plus some other changes). Other distros can take the code and/or inclusion process from Debian and improve it.

I don’t know what this Daylight OSM fork includes or doesn’t include, I guess we’ll have to look at the diff manually and try to reverse engineer the rules if we want to build on Facebook’s work?

Clicking through to the “learn info” posts, they talk about a few high level things like the LoCha algorithm it uses, but there is no set of rules that it uses. The first one boasts “Enhanced machine-augmented automatic review (Via rules + algorithmic checks + ML)” and 90% automatic approval rates, but does not share much that would help anyone build on this work instead of starting over from scratch.