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In all honesty, it's pretty much impossible to remove all your edits, and certainly not easily. But you shouldn't ask for them to be removed anyway, even if you decide to leave the project. As an analogy, if we were a group of volunteers planting trees to make a forest, and you decided you didn't want to continue with the project, that's fine, there's no problem there. However, it would be churlish to grab a spade and go around digging up all the trees that you've already planted. That's the same effect as stopping contributing to OSM, but also asking for all your data to be removed. Moreover, our draft code of conduct has a section covering leaving the project
If you decide to leave the project, that's fine, there's no problem there. But please be considerate and don't also go round removing contributions. |
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What edits you have published can not be unpublished. It will always be avalable under the current CC-BY-SA licence and there is nothing preventing your edits to be entered again after you have removed them. You have already agreead upon this when you signed up for OSM. If OSM changes its licence your edits will be purged if you have not accepted the new licence. But your edits might still be avalable in the original CC-BY-SA licence to be used by anyone just as they are now. Is removing my previous data considered an "edit"? "Entered again" doesn't mean restored? In this case I don't mind all my data to be entered again. Can't I brake my agreement of CC-BY-SA licence?
(03 Jun '11, 00:30)
UrSuS
I guess there may be just a minor difference between removing all of your own edits and removing all of someone else edits. All that work is under the CC-BY-SA license. If the action against the OSM database is not build upon good, accurate and well researched changes it could be considered vandalism.
(03 Jun '11, 00:57)
gnurk
How about pretending that I've used copyrighted sources for my edits? I remember that sometimes users were using Google Earth imagery and all their edits were removed.
(03 Jun '11, 01:09)
UrSuS
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Technically, to remove all your edits you would have to first identify them (i.e. use a full history planet, or download all your changesets, to find out exactly which objects you have created or modified). After that you would have to undo the changes, or delete objects you have created, or undelete objects you have deleted. There are scripts that can help you with that but since the edits in question may be older, it is possible that other people have edited an object after you did, or after you created it; simply removing everything you did could therefore have a damaging effect on the work of others. It is possible that after you have meticuously identified and undone all your edits, someone else comes along, takes the changeset in which you committed the changes, and simply undoes that with a push of a button in JOSM - in effect re-creating all "your" edits under his name. In fact this is very likely if others consider your contribution valuable - only useless contributions could vanish unnoticed. |
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Take a deep breath, turn off your computer for a couple of hours and, most importantly, don't take things too personally. |
If you can explain why you want or think you need to, we can probably help you better.
Unfortunately, I don't feel that I'm sharing the same ideas of open and collaborative OSM community with some of its users anymore. Therefore I want all my work and contributions to be removed.
If this is your reaction to my closing your questions then it is totally out of proportion. Nobody has a right for their particular edits to appear on the main Mapnik map, and in using help.openstreetmap.org to complain about a particular trac ticket not being acted upon and/or certain software maintainers not answering your emails, you have chosen an unsuitable communications channel that's all. See also the "FAQ" link in the upper right, and in the first two questions discussed there.