Emmor (account Palolo) asked some questions in an OSM message, I’ve put my response here as it may be of general interest.

On 2016-09-26 22:32:47 UTC Palolo wrote: > Ben, Thanks for your contributions to OSM, especially for the rivers you have cleaned up > on the west coast. I also just came across your spreadsheet tracking users and find it fascinating. > > I was wondering if you could convert your notes into 3 categories of mappers: > 1) Imports, 2) Mappers, 3) Combination mapper/importer ?

That’s a good question, I’ve considered trying it, but it can be difficult to tell them apart, or it requires individual detective work that I just haven’t gotten around to. Generally, for the import or part-import accounts, I’ve put the title of that import in the “Grouping” column.

If they have added millions of nodes, and there is nothing about importing in the “Where, What” or “Grouping”, it means I haven’t been able to figure out if they are an import account or not. For example the Japanese accounts, “Tom_G3X” and “ikiya” and “yamasan”. They are probably imports(?)

I’ve also put the account name in bold (like katpatuka and Heinz_V) if they have contributed millions of features without any obvious importing. Anyone who belongs in this category that I’ve missed, please let me know!

Also have you thought about gender classification?

I’ve thought about it, but it is also very hard to tell. Very few account names/images are clearly gendered, and nearly all those that are, by name or image, appear male.

It appears to me that there are very few female top contributors. I wonder why this is since it is open for anyone to edit.

Probably for the same reasons that cartography and technology in general is so male, cultural bias encourages it for men and encourages other things for women.

The top-ranked female account that I know of is “ediyes”, a Mapbox mapper at #137/88 (more than 88K changesets!). However, it’s entirely possible that some of the mysterious accounts in the top 100 are female. In the top 1000, there are many, including other female mapboxers (dannykath, karitotp, samely…) and the Queen of #MapLesotho, tshedy.

One editor that has been super active over the past 9 months is “Aiko Nakata”, which is a Japanese female-only name. Also “Febrina Dewi” and “Fatisya Ilani Yusuf” and “asti_shinoda”, all women I believe, were the top-ranked contributors to #MissingMaps last year, all from Indonesia, an amazing amount of mapping work.