It is a real shame that OSM provides no level of protection to any element the map. The map is growing not only in size but also in complexity. It is very easy to damage things. For example, deleting a single node may render a complex relation, like a turn restriction, completely useless.

In this example a newly registered user in few minutes and on his very first edit damaged a boundary relation with over 5 years of history and on which 5 experienced users work very hard. This shouldn’t be so easy in the first place.

There is no doubt that this user never knew his was breaking something. Very likely he got no warning whatsoever from iD, or if he got one, he did not understood what was going on.

It is also very likely that this user will make no further contribution to the map, not even a bad one. The vast majorities of user add one or two edits and never return.

The damage which this user inflicted is a small one, but it is no isolated incident. It is happening all the time and is getting worse.

Hundreds of new users are arriving on a daily basis. Each one is granted immediate access to the base with no restriction of any kind . This may have make sense in the early days of OSM, but not any longer. It is not even helpful for the new users. There is nothing more discouraging for a new user, who is eager to help, to discover that he or she broke something accidentally. And quite frankly iD is not helping a single bit in this respect.

Since we cannot block data from being damaged, the only sort-of-workaround is to use third party services, like whodidt, to monitor changes to the map continuously. But these services only alert us when the damage has already been done, like in the example above. Besides, even then it is sometimes very hard to spot the damage and correcting it is sometimes more time consuming then the original mapping. The fact that there are no built-in systems to alert us of critical changes also speaks for itself.

In the particular case of Brazil, where there are only a few active mappers (something between 20 to 30) this is proving a real burden, especially considering the size of the country. To put this in perspective, it would be like having just 2 mappers for Germany. Yet the weekly influx of new users in Brazil is around 30 to 50. Almost each day something is being broken, sometimes very badly like in this case were a new mapper deleted elements affecting all of South America.

My feeling is that we can no longer go on like this, and I am quite surprised that the companies who rely on OSM for their businesses are not crying out already.

OSM is often portreayed as the wikipedia of maps. Yet wikipedia, which once was completely free to edit, had to undergo some difficult changes.

I think that it is high time that OSM shifts it priority from gathering tons of new users to preserving the integrity of the map. Not only will we have a more reliable map, but we also will free the experienced mappers from the burden of constantly watching and correcting things that were not broken before.

The longer we wait, the harder it will get.