From time to time I go to Mogadishu trying to recover the huge mess.

This one is the weirdest thing I’ve seen in almost 15 years of mapping. Please go here 2.0237316, 45.2996601 and 130m away 2.0248249, 45.2999086 Are two tall buildings: the first one was transformed in 19 smaller buildings; the second was more lucky, it was transformed in just 3 or 4

For the time being no actions are taken by the managers of the HOT tasks. Unfortunately no actions as well from the DWG

After more than one Month (almost) nothing happened in the central part of Mogadishu (I mean the are among - rougly - Warshahada 21 Oktoobar, the airport, the old harbour) to recover from the “stampede” mapping.

I could say, citing George Orwell’s Animal farm “All cities are equal, but some cities are less equal than other” Try to imagine what huge fuss if that ….(thing)…. happens in an European city. But it happened instead in the poor Mogadishu. So: so what!

Today I checked again on WhoDidIt, what I’ve seen activities just from rab https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/rab (thanks so much, rab) and I, and few minor KeepRight fixes. It remain deformed streets and hundreds misaligned or bad rotated buildings. In that urban jungle those bad things will remain buried out there for years.

Too many words, too few actions.

@rab For the time being it’s still a huge mess.

Here few examples:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1033975735 (perhaps a big mosquee) it’s misaligned. In Dec 2021 there was this building https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/949004805 but it was moved and after deleted.

Many blocks of buildings was shifted, and many buildings deleted. But, while the buildings were shifted, roads weren’t (excluding some primary or secondary roads with 90 degrees bends).

This (6 or 7 floors) building https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1030048071 , before the mass deletion, was this one https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/949013794 but the 21 of February was moved in the middle of the block.

Where these buildings https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1033975772 https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1016975453 https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1017800962 have been seen on the images?

This road https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/28752372 has been drawn using Yahoo imagery :-O (yes, yahoo imagery, read the changeset’s comment https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/116653197 ), and in the same changeset check how many buildings have been deleted.

Beside that road you can see this one https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/28752259 how it was shaped.

And not far, please check this building https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1015961842 (originally was this one https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/942712706 , deleted) On the images, at its South you can see a road, but to make room for this misaligned thing, the existing one https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/128415480 was deleted

Where, on the satellite images, do you see these building https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1034436860 https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1016146112 https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1016146083 https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1023251370 ?

How these two buildings https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1015324791 https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1015324790 have been drawn that way (while this one https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/942879417 was deleted)?

Trying to recover that jungle of building seems to me an impossible challenge. IMHO a rollback to October/November 2021 would be the less painful action.

Many thanks Arnalie for having pointed to the talk.

Anyway, it should be crystal clear that in extremely dense areas is needed an expert hand; from the different images used in the years (with different shifts), to the difficulty - for the iD user, the majority in these projects - to not join together roads with buildings. I’m also wondering what goals, the HOT task creators, want reach. I mean, in the central part of Mogadishu we pushed a lot the building mapping, leaving just the tiniest and the difficult to recognize as buildings. When they get the data, don’t realize are horrible?

When, at the end of 2018, we started the UN Mappers project we accepted to engage the OSM community and all the potential issues. But sometimes is still very frustrating (and I started to contribute to OSM in 2007, so I got used to almost any kind of damage).

We are going to do our monthly internal database update, and we will patch the area avoiding to update Mogadishu.

I hope who will read this comment will agree with me: - we don’t need this kind of contributions - spot the issues in very dense areas is difficult and a waste of time - inexperienced users should be training a bit starting with simple tasks - inexperienced users don’t get anything back from this: no a minimum expertise in visual recognition; no topology knowledge, … - these bad data make some people frustrated making them stop to help the HOT tasks

Sorry for my rumble.

And, finally, I left you all with a good news: we are keen to see you all at State of the Map 2022 in Firenze (Florence, Italy)

Alessandro

Oh many thanks Andy. The user replied and he was very sorry.

I started to pan all the area were we added landuse/landcover to recover and, sometimes, update the features.

Thanks again for your huge work on DWG Alessandro

Delete them? Why you should delete a (maybe) disaligned geometries? If you are pretty sure are misaligned you’re welcome to correct them, but you shouldn’t delete.

Yes I think so, I’ve written that just to let know why I’ve deleted so many road.