And this is why incorporating user submitted information is a tricky strategy. On one hand, there sure are a lot more users than employees. On the other hand, bad actors are often far more motivated and diligent than good faith actors, and they will try to screw over your system for no good reason.
It continues to amaze me that OpenStreetMap is not massively plagued by this (I know that MapBox uses OSM as one of many sources, as mentioned in the article, but the changed name did not appear in the live OSM map, afaik, so I am guessing it came from somewhere else). In the past, the main explanatory argument was always that OSM's complicated editing process was the gatekeeper, but I don't think this is true anymore. With the OSM web editor, it is extremely simple to edit the map. It would only take a few clicks to immediately publish (for example) a highway in the form of a swastika to the live map, but despite using the map multiple times per day, both for private use and professionally, I have never encountered something like this.
We are just finishing building out our OSM infrastructure, and this morning in the shower I was thinking how nice it is that we can fix the maps by adding new construction and new roads (we do real estate for part of our state), and contribute this directly to OSM and then update tiles from OSM.<p>Then I came in to read this story.<p>Yesterday we were trying to figure out what our update strategy would be, if we would pull daily deltas, do quarterly updates, etc... We discussed the idea of vandalism and didn't have a good answer for how to prevent it. We thought about lagging behind the latest changes and then doing a "catch up" if vandalism was detected. Really what we'd like to do is make changesets based on the age of the change, except including our most recent changes (because our reputation is great :-), but I don't even know how to start doing that.
Looks like <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61555047" rel="nofollow">https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61555047</a> may have been the source of this. It's the only changeset in the history of OSM for the area that contains the offending term. It's from August 10, and was reverted on August 11 in <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61556585" rel="nofollow">https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61556585</a>
Correct me if I'm missing something, but what's the usecase for user submitted data on the map?<p>Do city names change so frequently that they need to be dynamically updated? I can see some use for it when you get to the neighbourhood level to account for local nicknames, but not full cities.