Centralized feedback channel for challenges

[jarek]

Sometimes well-meaning challenges are created with an incorrect premise or wrong parameters. There is no straightforward way of for users to report this, or to ask challenge participants to change their behaviour.

See for example #787 which resulted in several MapRoulette users incorrectly updating POIs within a region. Or https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/73733687 which is a MapRoulette user changing a nutrition supplements store to a fast food restaurant that has a similar name.

There is currently no centralized way of contacting the challenge participants to report a problem. Users can write comments on individual changesets, however this only reaches one challenge participant at the time - there is no way to track comments made on changesets for a given MapRoulette challenge. In #787 I wrote a comment on one user's changeset but other participants of the challenge continued incorrectly updating POIs.

I would suggest to provide a forum to give feedback on these changes in a centralized way. One example could be a comments field on the challenge page. It would be great to also link to it in the OSM changeset metadata (that's #178). I would also suggest adding a mention of the forum to the wiki page linked under "Learn" heading on MapRoulette page.

(This ticket was requested in #788 (comment))

[andrewharvey]

+1

Within each task there is a "Contact Owner" button which links to OSM to send a message to the user, but this doesn't seem to be exposed up at the challenge level. It also means that the discussion then happens in private between two people only rather than in public on the challenge page.

For an example, I wanted to send feedback to the owner of https://maproulette.org/browse/challenges/8108 to discuss refining exactly what was selected as a task, or potentially changing the advise given to the challenge participants (because someone deleted a valid road name through the challenge -> https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/71160746).

The intent is not necessarily to stop or block or scold the challenge author, rather to provide feedback if things aren't going as planned or issues begin to become apparent so they can be addressed.

[mvexel]

Worth a discussion, and thanks for starting it. With the plethora of communications channels that exist in the OSM world we should be careful to introduce yet another.

Having a comments field on the challenge page makes sense. Perhaps in combination with an option for a user to 'flag' the challenge which would notify the owner that there may be a problem.

[jschwarzenberger]

@mvexel is this possibly a duplicate of #1868?

[jarek]

Well, it's not a duplicate exactly, since that issue and its implementation doesn't allow reporting a challenge that you haven't participated in but which you've seen is bad. Take the example of https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/73733687. If I see this change, I shouldn't need to find this challenge on Maproulette and then perform another of these tasks to report that the challenge parameters are wrong.

But this issue has been open for 4 years and last year the project opened and implemented another issue which defined the problem differently.

So whether you take this issue as close-enough duplicate depends on how much you want to receive feedback on challenges from non-challenge-users.

[mvexel]

@jarek in my opinion, with the introduction of challenge flagging, we have dealt with this issue in a way that balances the OSM mappers need to be able to flag issues with MapRoulette challenges, and the need of MapRoulette as a project to make this process as hands-off as possible. We just don't currently have the personnel to review every issue with a challenge that comes up in the community. The flagging feature is meant to be self-governing, with the MapRoulette team and / or the OSM DWG only stepping in as a matter of last resort. This is also the model that OSM as a whole applies to issues with mapping activity.

[jarek]

Ok