Re: the issues with moderation, I sometimes wonder if Wikipedia were trying to start from scratch in the last few years... would it work? With all of the trolls and bots, easy access it might have died hard and early.
One of the most significant technical problems with OSM is the lack of a review model, that is for a change to the map to be staged and then reviewed before being applied. Not having this functionality caused ripples of problems throughout the system, some of which I'll discuss here.
Moderation is expensive, and Wikipedia got by initially with a pretty minimal degree of it, then ramped up as they got bigger. What if they’d been slammed by modern trolling at the start?
Just to meta-meta this conversation and the article in new and confusing ways, Wikimedia also hosts a map server, using OSM's data, @ https://maps.wikimedia.org/ :)
True. I sort of meant "similar"in a wider sense: large scale, community effort to do something useful. Wikipedia represents a lot about what we that the internet, and internet culture was.^
Remember how big a deal Wikipedia is. A lot of that "human knowledge at your fingertips" is Wikipedia.
Maybe that applies at a bigger level, with "similar"things being implemented as part of something. I suspect that a big part of the reason Wikipedias don't get started now is that they get implemented as startups.
Anything showing promise on that scale is a "unicorn" and in 2018 Jimmy Wales would have had a choice between private/startup and internet-owned. That's a billion dollar choice. For example, stack overflow could have been built like a Wikipedia. If it was done in 1996, that would be a sensible choice. In 2018, a founder would be forgoing an unthinkable sum of money, and also resources to make it happen with.
^I guess all this needs to be caveated with "other than OSS."
It's an interesting question of how much flexibility you give people at the beginning vs as a project matures, but I'm looking at the situation with OSM pragmatically, that is to say "What OSM needs to do now", rather than "What they should have done".
The problem of both bad edits and vandalism are very large (much like Google Mapmaker) and other measures we've put in place, such as changeset comments (which I helped develop) and vandalism tools don't seem to cut it.
What about some kind of automated approach to validation? A major difference between OSM data and something like wikipedia is that, unlike wikipedia, at least some of the OSM data verifiable. A street somewhere, does exist, in a particular spot. There must be some way to croudsource validation.
Ultimately it comes down to the resources to create such a thing, right? There have been some successes with crowdsourced validations such as Facebook's translation efforts (although I think in that case it was merely a component of the process). And it would rely on a volume of edits that OSM may not have. There may be 1000 people ready to verify the location of the Statue of Liberty, but probably not the location of every building in a remote area being mapped for HOT.
Mapbox has built the start of a validation framework, and they have done very cool stuff. Of course then they get criticized for "forking" OSM. There are definitely valid criticisms there, but it seems like there's no way to win.
I didn’t mean to distract from the main point of your piece (which was a good read btw), it just made me curious in general. Maybe the only way OSM can work is by treating moderation/curation as the problem to solve?
It appears to me that there was a golden age of crowdsourcing that lasted from maybe 1999 to 2010.
If you started a project in this time, you had the chance to get lots of quality contributions, for free, from people whose motivation is just to be part of something.
Now, you will get:
- Modern trolling, as you point out. Well-organized armies of trolls, some working for political purposes, some just for the lulz, can subvert anything.
- Disruptive bots (I don't know why this is a change since the golden age, but maybe it's simply that more people are better at programming)
- Spam that's a full-time job to moderate
- Lack of motivation because there are so many other fascinating things on the Internet
- A change in expectations because money has entered the equation -- crowdsourcing is now something that people do as a menial job, and they aren't paid enough to do it well
The sabotage by 4chan of the crowdsourcing team in the Pentagon shredder challenge [1; sorry about the stupid title] makes a good indicator of the end of the crowdsourcing era. That happened in 2011.
I run a project, ConceptNet [2], that has obtained a lot of its data from crowdsourcing. Years ago, I stopped supporting the ability for the public to edit ConceptNet directly. (This does not mean the project shut down. Far from it. It currently produces state-of-the-art NLP models.) Supporting public contributions became obviously not worth the effort. Some projects that started at the right time and maintained excellent communities are still working, though -- Wiktionary would be an example, and it's one of the places that still provides new data to ConceptNet.
that kinda overestimates how long it took wikipedia to get to where it is today. when wikipedia launched, no one knew what it would grow into. why would large amounts of trolls bother harassing wikipedia when in all likelihood it would have just gone nowhere.
One of the most significant technical problems with OSM is the lack of a review model, that is for a change to the map to be staged and then reviewed before being applied. Not having this functionality caused ripples of problems throughout the system, some of which I'll discuss here.
Moderation is expensive, and Wikipedia got by initially with a pretty minimal degree of it, then ramped up as they got bigger. What if they’d been slammed by modern trolling at the start?