Moderation team for talk and osmf-talk mailing lists/Votes/Complaint about posts by OSM Community Member Lutz

Voting proposal to the Moderation team for: 1) talk mailing list, 2) osmf-talk mailing list and 3) the categories "general", "general:tagging", and "foundation" on community.openstreetmap.org by Allan Mustard · Closing Sat 31 Dec 2022 8:00PM

Complaint about posts by OSM Community Member Lutz

Resolution

That the moderators have determined that OSM community member Lutz violated multiple OSMF Etiquette guidelines in a thread posted to a channel overseen by the moderators, to wit: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/wie-konne-sich-freizeitmapper-vor-der-willkur-kommerzieller-datenauswerter-schutzen/6888

Background

The thread was precipitated by a changeset discussion (https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39776845) between Lutz and Mateusz Konieczny, with contributions from MMD. The subject of the disagreement is the appropriateness of mapping historical objects which are no longer extant.

It is a long established standard of OpenStreetMap to avoid mapping historical objects which do not exist physically in the present day (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice). For this specific changeset, the contributions of Lutz allegedly did not meet this standard.

Lutz takes issue with Mateusz and MMD seeking the assistance of the DWG to enforce the verifiability standard for Lutz's contribution.

Incident Description and Findings

By his own admission Lutz deliberately escalated this disagreement to the general community forum, creating the aforementioned thread with the following misleading title: "How can recreational mappers protect themselves from the arbitrariness of commercial data evaluators?"

In the post, Lutz alleges persecution by Geofabrik (the aforesaid commercial data evaluator) and falsely claims association of Mateusz Konieczny with the firm, disparaging Mateusz Konieczny as a 'Polish offshoot' of the entity.

Geofabrik and the DWG are independent organizations, with Frederik Ramm being the only common member between them, yet Lutz does not indentify Frederik Ramm in the thread as a persecutor.

Lutz also refers to other OSM community members in good standing as "Mickey Mouse", which is widely acknowledged as a disparaging term indicating incompetence and poor quality.

The moderation working group stresses that good-faith, constructive criticism of all OSM participants, commercial or otherwise, is welcomed. However this thread does not qualify, as transparently no connection exists between Konieczny as a 'Polish offshoot' of the entity.

Geofabrik and the DWG are independent organizations, with Frederik Ramm being the only common member between them, yet Lutz does not indentify Frederik Ramm in the thread as a persecutor. Lutz also refers to other OSM community members in good standing as "Mickey Mouse", which is widely acknowledged as a disparaging term indicating incompetence and poor quality.

The moderation working group stresses that good-faith, constructive criticism of all OSM participants, commercial or otherwise, is welcomed. However this thread does not qualify, as transparently no connection exists between Mateusz Konieczy and the firm Geofabrik, and Lutz resorted to derogatory, ad hominem verbiage.

Result

The moderators determined that Lutz violated the following etiquette guidelines:

• Posting false or inaccurate information.
• Using unwelcome, suggestive, derogatory or inappropriate nicknames or terms.

The question before the moderators as a group is whether to impose a one-week ban on participation in the forum, and to admonish Lutz that following expiry of the ban, while his continued participation in forum discussions is encouraged, he must avoid making demonstrably false statements and refrain from using inappropriate epithets.

Votes

Unanimously approved with 5 votes in favour: Angela Teyvi, Radmila Jovanovic, Logan McGovern, Rubaina Adam, Allan Mustard.

Proposal by Allan Mustard. Content of attachment distributed together with the voting proposal. Screenshot of the voting proposal and votes, provided to the OSMF board by the team.