Hi, I noticed many different accounts ( wjc31, KewpieIsGod, WI NOMAD, DBC141, TedTimesSix, Mark of Zorro ecc.ecc.) adding “Flock Safety” ALPRs in the United States in the last five months. These elements were added by different users, but they all made the same “mistake” (invalid Q-Items, e.g. operator:wikidata=(WikiData ID), see this query), which made me think of an undocumented import and/or organized edit and/or sockpuppets. But I’m not a local so I report it here so you locals can check it better. I tought maybe it was just different users copying another ALPR tag list, but I see some used the same weird bracket pattern for tags there were not present already in the database, e.g. operator=(AllentownPolice). Some accounts were created just a day apart. Most of them only added Flock Safety cameras and made 2-30 changesets to then disappear. It looks like a weird pattern to me, but again, I prefere to leave any decision to the local community.
These are coming from people seeing https://deflock.me/ due to increased coverage of that site. It encourages people to add the cameras to OSM, and these folks are probably just new mappers making mistakes.
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You are right, seems like people is blindly copying the tags they suggest. Mystery solved, thanks. Maybe we could contact them to make the tag list less prone to errors? I guess most people is not familiar with Wikidata.
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The suggested tags came out of this discussion:
I recently began adding local cameras as I see them. When I began, ID had a preset if you searched for ‘Flock’. Now you have to start with surveillance camera and continue from there. Possibly the Wikidata info was corrected then. I never consult Wikidata directly but just use the ID preset.