Colombia/Projects/Notes resolution

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This is an initiative from MaptimeBogota, which aims to close all Notes that have been opened for several years in Colombia.

Objective

The Notes mechanism is a way for map users (who do not map) to interact with the mappers community. We want to encourage those map users by making sure their observations are corrected in a timely manner. By working on Notes, we will have a lower rate of open notes. Most open Notes would then be more recently opened ones. In this way, the users will be encouraged to give more feedback, that helps the mappers keep the map up to date.

History

The opened Notes in Colombia reached a peak of more that 6000 by the end of 2020. Many of them were already open for serveral years. The MaptimeBogota group decided to process the Notes of Bogota, to make it become the first city in Colombia without open Notes for long time.

In parallel, the group started to process the oldest and newest Notes in Colombia, thanks to the Neis Pascal page: https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-notes-country?c=Colombia. This page shows the list of opened nodes, sort by date.

In August 2021, there were no longer open notes in Bogotá. Only those recently opened, so the activity was expanded to solve those all of Colombia.

Likewise, the notes have been used in Colombia by the Microsoft OpenMaps project to identify unmapped roads, and they themselves have resolved them. However, when they identify routes, they create hundreds of notes on the map in a few days, and then they go on solving them over several months.

As of January 2022, all notes have been closed, and the ones that now appear open are the ones that were recently created. The phase of closing the old notes is over, and now the community must try to maintain that low rate of open notes.

Work done

To carry out this activity, virtual meetings have been held since May 2021 every Saturday to resolve notes. Likewise, a channel was created on Telegram to discuss this on time: https://t.me/osm_notes_latam

Likewise User icon 2.svgangoca (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.) created the following notes articles as a result of this debug work:

Methodology

To massively close notes, you cannot open one by one of those that appear on the OpenStreetMap page. Instead the following tools have been used:

  • Neis Pascal page that allows to list the open notes of a country and show them in an orderly way: https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-notes-country?c=Colombia.
  • JOSM is recommended for its versatility and number of plugins.
    • ContinuosDownload - After having downloaded a small part of the map, this plugin automatically downloads more data by simply panning the map.
    • JOSM's Notes panel allows you to drop notes directly into the currently displayed area. For example, you can first download all the data for a city, then zoom out and download all the notes in that city.
      • The note viewer displays the notes in order of id, which corresponds to their relative age.
    • Buildings is always an interesting plugin to map constructions as buildings.
    • For missing tracks you can activate the Strava Heatmap layer. There are browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox to easily add Strava to JOSM (and iD).

Every time a note is fixed, mention the Note number in the changeset comment.

Afterwards, the note can closed. This will automatically send a message that the person who created the note will receive (if it is not an anonymous note).

Resolution messages

All notes must have a unified message for the resolution of the notes. This allows you to see the team's work.

This is the message that is put to each processed note:

Gracias por contribuir en OSM https://bit.ly/osm-wiki-co Tg https://bit.ly/osm-nl #ONL

(Translation: Thanks for contributing to OSM https://bit.ly/osm-wiki-co Tg https://bit.ly/osm-nl #ONL).

The hashtag #ONL refers to OpenStreetMap Notes Latam. Likewise, other hashtags can be used if the resolution of notes is through another project, for example #kaart.

Useful

For the notes that have enough information, and explain the observation in a clear way, they can be closed with a message such as: "Mapped", or other similar content, in order to show an interaction with the person who opened them, indicating that it was captured. on the map what the note said.

After the custom message, put the generic message at the beginning of this section.

Missing or invalid information

Other notes are considered invalid (for the following reasons), and simply have to be closed:

  • They are not clear (personal opinion, personal location data, text that is not an observation).
  • They refer to a device problem and not to the map itself.
  • They are partial explanations of the problem (place changed its name - But what is the new name?).
  • It is poorly located (it indicates an address, but it is clearly not located near the tracks with that name).
  • It is already mapped with the indications of the notes.

As part of the resolution text for the note, you can indicate why it is invalid, followed by the generic text at the beginning of this section.

With the above, the user can be guided to better describe his notes, so that we can process them by modifying something on the map. Likewise, they can be encouraged to become contributors to the community.

Contributors

Other users who have closed notes but are not part of the project.

Hashtag

Both in the comment of the resolution of the note, and in the commit, the Hashtag must be put: #ONL

Others

Additional things have come out as part of this project, for example:

Links