Talk:Organised Editing/Activities/Notes resolution in Latam

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Closing notes

Re: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Organised_Editing/Activities&curid=228335&diff=2272088&oldid=2270590

Are you closing older notes without verification or fixing them? Solely because they are old?

It is normal that there are many notes present and waiting for local verification. Please do not close notes solely for being old or made edits blindly based on unconfirmed notes.

It is fine to close notes that are outdated, unclear or useless but "keeping just a small quantity of recently opened notes" is highly harmful.

Have you discussed it with local communities at least? Using all methods specified on contact channels? (I also posted to User talk:Angoca)

"where we will see that the C/O ratio will be increased in all Latam countries." that seems case of chasing metric for sake of chasing metric and damaging what was intended to be measure by it.

Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 08:41, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi Mateusz.
First of all, we trust in the notes. I mean, we believe they were created with a purpose, to indicate a difference between the map and what is on the ground. Based on this, we do not need to go to every single note place and verify the content of the note to see if it is correct. If someone wants to make vandalism, it won’t create a note, it will do the vandalism directly on the map.
Second, when we say that we process notes, this means we read the text, we analyze it based on local knowledge (that's why I don't close notes from other places than Colombia), we perform a change on the map, and finally, we close the note. Even, if the note is not clear, we leave a message asking for more details. However, sometimes we know we will never receive feedback, especially when the note is anonymous. In this case, we leave a message, and we close the note. For us, the notes are the best interaction place between map users and mappers, and in a global context, we have forgotten this. In fact, we are trying to revive this, and we want to make sure, our map users are heard, but this can only be done by processing the notes few days after they have been created, not years after.
Third, we have already done this activity in Colombia, last year we resolve thousands of notes. The Colombian community was more than informed. We invited all Colombian mappers, and many of them joined us. We notified them by mailing list, Telegram channel, wiki, and events. We received comments and we did adjustments in our activity. But the community agreed with us to close all old notes. Now, based on the Colombian experience, we are extending this initiative to other Latin American countries. And regarding the Latam community, it has been also notified; in fact, in our first meeting of this year, we agreed that we will do a Notathon periodically. For this, we have created the event, we have published in different places and the people who assist to the events know how to proceed with the notes.
By resolving notes, we have involved mappers in this OSM feature, and it had given us the opportunity to work together, to tighten our efforts for the same purpose, by working locally.
Finally, by leaving old notes opened, this does not provide anything. No one will see them, no one will go to the place and verify if this is correct. This is not Germany where there are thousands of mappers looking for details to map; instead, we are just a few, and there are many problems in our maps, even bigger problems than notes. By processing notes and processing them on time, this will make our Latin American maps more updated, with a community of mappers integrated, and the map users heard. And when a user is heard, he will continue contributing to the map, or he can even become a mapper.
(We already discussed this in the https://t.me/osm_notes_latam channel.)
--AngocA (talk) 14:55, 28 February 2022 (UTC)