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Why does MapComplete not allow anonymous contributions?
A question that many ask is why MapComplete does not allow anonymous contributions.
At first sight, it makes perfect sense: it is a user-friendly tool and making an account is a huge hurdle which a lot of people don't take. "Many more people would contribute if an account is not needed!". And this is undeniably true! The signup-process is hard and loses a lot of people; even though we are making steps to improve this.
And this is technically possible too - a few other projects have taken this approach:
- https://wheelmap.org/ uses a single user account too add data to osm.org. (wiki page)
- https://www.onosm.org/ creates an anonymous map note (wiki page )
As usual, allowing or not allowing anonymous contributions is a tradeoff. I (pietervdvn), as creator of MapComplete, have the opinion that having anonymous contributions for MapComplete would be a net negative.
Anonymous notes burden the heavy mappers (or are never resolved)
In some regions, there are a few heavy contributors who try to resolve all notes. In Belgium (where I'm from and thus have knowledge of), there are organized efforts to bring down the number of notes. This effort is mainly carried by 4 or 5 contributors (I could write them down here, but that is beside the point).
Adding anonymous notes would just generate a lot of extra work for them; becoming "anonymous mapping by proxy" - although those people would probably do an extra check on the data, basically replicating the effort of the original contributor.
If there is no systematic note resolving in an area, this means that the data will never be added to OSM and will never be used and get stale over time, being a useless contribution.
This can be witnessed in some regions with notes for onOsm.org, for example here https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/2718428#map=13/19.95786/79.30876&layers=N
There is no possibility to contact the contributor...
By having an anonymous contribution, it is not possible for the community to reach out to the contributors. This means that, in case of doubts, questions or incomplete information, it is not possible to follow up. This is currently a major grieve with anonymous map notes.
Someone who systematically makes the same mistake would be impossible to contact. It would even be impossible to know if it is one person making this mistake, or if there is something unclear in MapComplete which causes new contributors to systematically make a mistake.
... which hurts community building
Furthermore, OpenStreetMap is more then the data; it is also the people behind it and the relations they build. Many contributor don't feel the need to get in touch with the wider community, but some of them will.
In Belgium (and many other areas), core contributors systematically send a welcome message to new mappers with hints and more info. Anonymous contributions make this impossible and thus deny the new contributor of getting in touch.
Errors and vandalism becomes easier to do and harder to clean up
Up till now, we didn't have any vandalism with MapComplete.
Not having a to write down a name or to log in lowers the barrier to experiment. People might not realize that their actions are making changes for everyone; or they might realize and intentionally change some data.
We had a lot of low-quality edits via Maps.me, especially of people who didn't understand that their addition was shared (I've seen "hotels" named "grandma" because they stayed for a few days there)
We also had one spam-campaign carried out using MapComplete. It would have become practically impossible to clean up this mess if this would have happened with anonymous accounts, whereas the Data Working Group could simply revert all changes by those users now.
Editing programs are not allowed to have anonymous contributions
Bing map builder had a single user account for all changes - until they got blocked. The foundation asked them to address some grievances with anonymous contributions. Please read the wiki for more details I was also opposed to their practice of using pseudonymous, numerical accounts, as you can read in my diary entry about the topics
wheelmap.org gets an exception to this, because they only modify a single tag (and can thus not do a lot of damage) and are old - they started in 2010, when OSM was 5 years old and unusable anyway.
To wrap it up
Anonymous accounts would indeed allow more contributions, but would shift the work to the already existing community instead of growing it. As such, I'd rather put energy into making the signup process easier - for which we already made some attempts