Vandalism on OpenStreetMap

"Recently" there have been waves of severe vandalism on OSM where lot's of data (for instance, russian names on places) has been deleted or modified in a misleading way.

As you can see on the previous image, when there is a vandalism action there is a slow revent counteraction, this takes time and effort from volunteers.

Now, with the problem stated, I'm gonna give my opinion on some possible solutions on how to solve (or mitigate at least) this!

• Rate limit these gigantic changesets.

Problem with this one is that it would impact those who import data (with the authorization from the data owner) and wouldn't prevent multiple small changesets.

• Making a "tier" system based on account age and changesets made

This is a two edge sword, in a way it would make it harder for vandals to create accounts and start doing their bad things immediately. But nothing would prevent creating a ton of accounts and making some meaningless changesets in the meantime to trick the system

• Fixing previous problem: Rate limit account creation or tying it to some limited resource (phone numbers for example)

This would lead to extra costs from the osm foundation and phone numbers (as well as IPs) are kinda unlimited (with a very low cost) so vandals could keep using them

• Vouching for a certain user to allow it to climb to a higher "tier"

Following the tier system from before, a more experienced user (and trusted by the community) could vouch other users making them "level up". This could work, but as long as a vandal somehow gets verified it can vouch for their own extra accounts, leading to the same problem all over again