A Quantitative Approach to Identifying Emergent Editor Roles in Open Street Map
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objective of this study was to investigate and classify the roles, or distinct contribution styles, adopted by participants within the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community. Using a quantitative analysis of mapping behaviors, we devised a methodology to identify distinct features associated with specific roles. We used an unsupervised clustering approach and unveiled eight discernible roles, or types of mapper in OSM. Each role displays specific patterns of mapping behaviors related to their habits and preferences for adding or editing map objects over time. We validated our roles, in part, using known affiliations with humanitarian and corporate organizations. Using these roles, we examine community composition and contributor retention over time. Our contributions include applying existing methods on the analysis of contributor behavior in online platforms to OSM, the identification of eight roles that can guide future research and design within OSM, and further understanding into the overall trajectory of the world’s largest geospatial peer production community.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".