📊 First changeset review insights for Andhra Pradesh, India

• 🙋‍♂️ Review Requests: 32% of newcomers requested a review of their first changeset.
• ✨ Technical Quality: 32% of a newcomer’s very first edits are completely free of technical errors.
• ⚠️ Low-Severity Issues: 49% of changesets have low serverity errors like abbreviation issues or duplicate node-way geometries

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💡 Localized, faster community validation workflows are essential to support mapping talent.

About 450 editors join OpenStreetMap and contribute their first edit everyday based on a study for the year 2023.¹ Despite diverse OSM review tools and processes, there were few studies about OSM new editor data quality at country level.² Very little is known about their contribution quality and persistence at province level. This need was identified in the first ever desk analysis of State of the map for Andhra Pradesh in 2025. Even attempting to statistically analyze is not easy, given the need to query databases with specialized programs. OSM Changeset Analyser(OSMCha) is a very good tool for reviews. Using OSMCha and OSM APIs, I built a small Python Jupyter notebook program with help from Github Copilot. I applied this to understand the new editors contributions for Andhra Pradesh province of India for Q1, 2026. I found that 32% of first edit changesets are of good quality. 49% have low severity issues. Only 3% continue the edit activity in the subsequent 30 days after discussion on their first changesets. This program can be reused easily by modifying OSMCHA’s AOI filter identifier and OSMCHA user token.

Review process using OSMCha

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Link to the Time Lapse Video of Amaravati (2015-2025)

Time lapse video of OSM has been of interest to me for more than 10 years. I learned to use QGIS in 2015 and made a physical map of Andhra Pradesh in my first attempt. Learning QGIS with its myriad menus and concepts of GIS was daunting to venture further during my infrequent attempts. Finally I made my first time lapse video after 10 years. I found OSM contributor radiotrefoil's diary entry on the subject posted about an year back very helpful. Still I had to struggle to make a good video for OSM edits for Amaravati, the green field capital of bifurcated Andhra Pradesh, a province of India. This is an attempt to document my learnings and make it easier for others.

Choosing an area of interest and fetching data

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While commercial map providers like Google, provide map data in local Indian languages, the local language labels are usually transliterated from English, resulting in errors. OSM, Wikidata and Wikipedia platforms provide a way to improve the local language maps leveraging multilingual labels through Wikidata identifiers on OSM, through semi automated updates. For good quality maps on Wikipedia and OSM, the Wikidata location needs to be accurate and Wikidata identifier should be uniquely mapped to the actual OSM geometry. I worked on removing the mismatches for villages of a district in Andhra Pradesh. I have documented my experience as clearly as possible, so that even users with less programming and tools skills can contribute to the work. As an example, identifying and fixing errors in Wikidata location is given below.

Identifying and fixing error in locations on Wikidata pages

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I did lot of contribution data analysis on Wikipedia. I wanted to do similar thing for OSM. Finally, here is my first analysis. I downloaded the fuel outlets data as of 2023-07-07 from OSM in Andhra Pradesh using overpass-turbo query. I used google sheets to analyse the data. Here are some results.

Summary of geometries

Total : 504

• node:373 (74%)
• way:131 (26%)

Year of last touch

Year    Count
2008    1
2011    8
2012    17
2013    23
2014    6
2015    23
2016    29
2017    23
2018    59
2019    52
2020    48
2021    54
2022    83
2023    78

Unique contributors

year	Unique contributors
2008	1
2011	5
2012	5
2013	6
2014	2
2015	6
2016	10
2017	10
2018	18
2019	19
2020	28
2021	8
2022	24
2023	10

Top 10 contributors

Top 10 contributors (as per last touch) accounted for 54.76% of contributions. There were 132 contibutors in all.

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I added 52 fuel filling stations which is 11.5% increase over earlier count of 451 across Andhra Pradesh. I spent about 10 hours logging the points of interest (POI) and another 10 hours updating them. Here is my backstory or how-to-do guide. I have been an OSM mapper from 2015, having learnt basics from PlaneMad and received mentoring from Heinz Vieth. I have been mapping occasionally about my neighborhood and places that I visit. I also installed Osmand on my smartphone and explored its navigation and trip and POI recording features. In my recent trip to my native state, I tried to record road side fuel filling stations as I drove on the roads as a passenger in car or bus. I used josm to update the OSM.

POI recording

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