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

[PierZen]

@drolbr

In total we have seen in the past 11 years an estimated 200-2000 benign recurring users (out of a total of almost 2 million mappers) that have uploaded in the first hour more than 1000 edits. The 20k number in the talk includes one-off mappers, imports, bots, and spam, and the 200-2000 are extrapolated from the findings after manually analyzing users as explained in the talk.

The limit is designed to give long term users and ultimately the DWG enough time to stop vandalism early. This has and must have priority, because these caring users are scarce. The number of now long term users we might have put off if we had the limit already in the past is most likely a one-digit figure per year or zero.

Dont you think that mapathons organisers can easily re-arrange their sessions with first a short period of editing, then followed by a group discussion where we evaluate the various mapping done, problems encountered, difficulty to interpret images, etc. The best would be to have a projector to show with OSMCha or similar tool the various contributions. Plus the prolific mappers could surely help others. This might contribute to interest more mappers to come back later and map again.

I briefly present below some statistics that I compiled from the Changesets Planet file. I observed for 2023 that 2,370 new mappers did map more then 1,000 objects for the first hour. These mappers represents 1.6% of the 152,000 new mappers last year.

And note that the mappers contribution reduce rapidly in the following hours. The first hour alone represents 57% of the objects edited for the first 3 days by the new contributors (66% for the first 4 hours).

The graphic below shows the objects edited by the new mappers in their first hour of contribution classed by the no of objects edited. From Oct.17 to 28, we observe a high volume of edits in the first hour. Many of these accounts it seems do not exist anymore. While these were high volumes of edits, the OSM-Ops need some flexibility to operate when such events arise.