The new rate limiting prevents participants to Missing Maps mapathons from saving buildings

[Matija_Nalis]

@drolbr

The rate limits would have been hit in the past 11 years relatively rarely (in the talk after 11 minutes) by benign users. Note that I have hand checked for a substantially higher limit. The lower limit has been hit more often: absolutely too often for manual review, relatively rarely.

I do found the methodology there somewhat problematic. It seems that they’ve cut out as unimportant outliers anybody with “less than 100 changesets” because they’re “not sustainably active, thus not a big loss for a community”.

One thing is that is IMHO horrible justification (do we really expect to attract new contributors with attitude like that?! What happened with “If everybody mapped only their own neighbourhood we’d have perfect map of the world in minutes”? That ideal scenario requires one changeset per mapper)

But another thing is that premise is problematic for those activities designed to attract new users (basically most users on a mapathon that succeeds in attracting new users will by definition have “less than 100 changesets”), thus will not account for the issues we’re seeing here at all. Yes, I understand that this cutoff simplified an analyses a lot, but it also lost a lot of crucial information.

@drolbr

However, it would be a beneficial research task: How many (and which) users that now fulfill the conditions for active users have uploaded over 1000 object versions in the first hour of their mapping activity, structured by number of years of ongoing activity?

That would be interesting, yes. But still suffer from survivorship bias (i.e. “how many didn’t become active solely or mostly because of such arbitrary limits driving them away”, which would be much more interesting, though)