There is chaos happening in the OpenStreetMap Hong Kong community recently. Someone keeps changing peak name into its old name and sometimes changing hamlet into its old name too. There are some senior OpenStreetMap contributors who remind him

and changed the names to old names. Some old names are original from Hakka people, which use different Chinese characters compared to Hong Kong Cantonese names.

The community members reverted his edit, and included the name he added as alt_name or old_name. But he doesn’t accept it, and changes back to the name he added. And of course not listening to others’ concerns. There are so many Hong Kong hiking apps using OpenStreetMap data. His edits made things worse for people who rely on apps’ map data.

He and the community members have edit wars for months. I use my Data Working Group privilege and hope to solve the chaos. I block several accounts and hope they could listen and discuss with the concerned community members. But soon we find out he has multi-accounts or a butch of coordinated accounts. And I have to block those accounts too.

Taiwan hiking community relies on OpenStreetMap data too, just like in Hong Kong. But fortunately, Taiwanese Hokkien origin names have just a few differences from Taiwanese Mandarin, compare to Hong Kong Hakka and Hong Kong Cantonese. Just a few years ago, the OpenStreetMap Taiwan community have an agreement with the Taiwan Hiking community, we will map the survey points and peaks separately. And will not upload survay GPS traces to the OpenStreetMap database.

OpenStreetMap Taiwan’s biggest use case is hiking. And the hiking trail is drawn and maintained by the hiking community in Taiwan, making the hiking trails very detail compare to roads network, POI, buildings and landuses in Taiwan. Taiwan situation is quite different compared to Africa, South Asia, or South East Asia, we didn’t have much use case of emergency.

We already have well-funded government rescue agencies and NGO systems. European and American countries don’t have trouble accessing detailed mountain hiking trails and companies or organizations have no trouble making hiking maps.

It is very hard for companies to make hiking maps in Taiwan. That is OpenStreetMap opportunity in Taiwan: the default hiking map in Taiwan. Taiwan and Hong Kong have a similar contributor demographic: the hiking mappers. They are the main force to draw hiking trails.

• HK01 Report: 行山｜共享地圖OpenStreetMap爆改地名大戰　山友憂慮增加意外(in zh-hk)
• 山城縱走 hkhiker Option(in zh-hk)
• 記者會直播 (in Cantonese)