New Users in Washington State

2020 saw 746 new users in Washington State make their first edit. Down just slightly from the previous two years. Anecdotally it appears that we had fewer SEO edits than in past years.

Welcome Message

Welcome messages were sent to 696 of those new mappers, up from last year. Only 26 people replied at least once to the welcome message. I should note that the welcome message doesn’t ask for a reply. Of the new users, 84 replied to changeset comments. A total of 1784 changeset comments were made on the new users edits. Not all of these changeset comments required a reply. Tips were left on 351 changesets.

Edit Quality

I tried to review all of their edits before I send out the Welcome message. Some days when I had other more pressing chores the reviews were just a quick check. In some cases I left a Tip: in the changeset comment on better mapping practices. If the edit was harmful I either reverted or fixed their edit. Harmful could mean that the new mapper unintentionally dragged a node or disconnect a road.  There were eight cases of vandalism which were all reverted.

TIPS

As mentioned above, I left 351 tips. Below are the most common tips left.

Tip	#
Instructions on how to square buildings	88
Street names should not be abbreviated	37
Instead of deleting and redrawing, modify the geometry to preserve the history	23
How to adjust the imagery offset	22
Draw just the roof outline of a building, not the entire area	18
A number of the tips involved addresses including not deleting the address when deleting a poi	17
Descriptive names should not be use	11
When to use access=no (people wanting to prevent others from driving on their neighborhood road	10
Limit edit area instead edits in multiple parts of the state	10
Encourage the mappers to leave brief descriptive changeset comments	8

Top New Mappers

The top mappers, by the number of editing days are shown below along with any company association. Four of the top five mappers work as paid mappers. Disclaimer - a top mapper has a much better chance to make this list if they started editing early in the year. Only those with 15 editing days or more are on the list

User Name	Edit Days	Company
DowntownAbby	168	Kaart
KiloCrimson	133
nllucky	103	Amazon Logistics
VLD164	87	Facebook
Shashank Saraogi	86	Amazon Logistics
austinsnow	68
150074	67
watmildon	65
brownbray	62
markkerrigan	51
I_Tripped_And	44
MatildaWolf	44
CardinalScout	39
Fogey7	35
funwhilelost	25
AJ Fite	21
beepbeep123123	19
goldenempireguy	19
LRC1900	19
PaulWC911	16
RobSturza	16
beleki2020	16
Mark Plesko	15
Shortree	15