Off Topic - Someone undid a lot of my work

[Michael Medina]

I have no other OSM community to ask this question of, but a while ago I redrew a national forest boundary in WA and at some point someone either reverted it or redrew it.  I was working in the area and it was important to me to have this border accurate.  I drew from the latest GIS data from the USFS and it's been put back to something quite old.  How do I remedy this, how do I prevent this from happening again, and how do I find who did it so I can let them know what they did was incorrect and that it shouldn't be done again.

I know of the history tab in iD, but my edits are at least a year old it's just not giving me the answers I need after 40 some clicks on "load more".

Thanks

[Peter Dobratz]

All edits to OSM data are contained in changesets.  The changesets tells you exactly which user has edited the data and also allows the user to fill in a comment as to the purpose of the changeset.  

If you are on the openstreetmap.org website, you can zoom in to the edge of the forest boundary.  Then click the layers icon and check the "Map Data" box.  Once the map data overlay loads, you can click on a Node or Way object (then uncheck "Map Data" as it slows down the web browser).  Once you have the Node or Way selected, there is a link to the last changeset that touched the object.  There's also a "View History" link to show the entire list of changsets that touched the object.  Depending on whether the user deleted your work and created new objects or modified the existing objects, your changes may not show up in the history.

You can also see the list of all changesets for any specific user using something like: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Peter%20Dobratz/history

Sometimes I find it easier to browse the history in JOSM as it has a GUI that shows you things like exactly which tags have changed on the object over time.  However, I don't know of a way to easily view changes to the geometry of a Way over time.  You have to actually inspect the history of each Node that makes up the Way.

Maybe the user who made the edits has left some information in the changeset describing what they were doing.  Once you find the relevant changeset, you can post public discussion comments on that changeset, which hopefully the editor will respond to. Alternatively, you can send a private message to the user who made the changes.

Changesets can be reverted using various mechanisms.  However, it becomes more difficult if other changes have been made to any of the objects since then.

There is no way to prevent other users from modifying data that you have contributed.  The hope is that people editing the map are improving the data, but that is not always the case.  It's also possible that your view of what's correct may not align directly with the other user's view.

If you post more specific details about the forest in question, I can also take a look and point you to the relevant changesets.

Note: there is also a fairly active Seattle OSM group and they may be more familiar with data in Washington: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Seattle,_Washington

Peter

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[Michael Medina]

I was eventually able to track it down and wrote the author.  I linked them to the appropriate data sources so they can redo it or at least I can revert it.

Thanks