An overview of reviews made with MapComplete

Posted by Pieter Vander Vennet on 1/29/2023

MapComplete has - for some thematic maps - the ability to leave a review on an entity with Mangrove.Reviews. Up till now, I had no idea how much this feature was used. However, due to technical reasons I had another look to the reviews module and discovered the ‘download all’-option on mangrove.reviews

Mangrove Clients

The analysis was made with data from 20 january 2023, downloaded around 17:00 UTC time.

This data contained 660 reviews. As the website making the review is recorded, we can make a breakdown of the top websites:

  • https://mangrove.reviews is unsuprisingly the most popular website to make reviews on, with 318 reviews made
  • MapComplete is the second (and the biggest ‘external’ website), with 192 reviews (of which 13 are made with the development version)
  • toggenburg.swiss is third, with 35 reviews

A variety of smaller websites follows, each with a few reviews made. At first glance, most of them seem to be swiss or german. Furthermore, there are 5 reviews made by localhost:1234 and 7 by localhost:5000. The former is probably me, testing the creation of reviews while developing.

The full table is listed below.

Client websiteNumber of reviews
https://mangrove.reviews318
https://mapcomplete.osm.be179
https://toggenburg.swiss35
https://thurgau-bodensee.ch29
https://pietervdvn.github.io13
https://open-reviews.orderingstack.com13
https://heidiland.com12
https://open-reviews.net12
https://winterthur.com9
https://ostschweiz.ch7
https://localhost:50007
https://actuallyfoods.com5
https://staging.mangrove.reviews5
https://localhost:12345
https://examples.twblue.cms.tso.ch3
https://ivydog.art (has NSFW content)2
https://toggenburg-aktiv.ch1
https://modernmount.blogspot.com1

Themes

It seems that pet owners gave reviews the most. The ‘pets’-theme - first known as the ‘dog’ theme - yielded 35 reviews in total (if summed). The ‘Pin je Punt’-campagin by Visit Flanders (which included pubs and cafés) is a close second with 29 reviews, followed by the shops theme.

While it might be surprising that the pets-theme has such a high number of reviews, the reason for this is straight-forward: the review-module is placed on top of the infobox for vets, whereas most other layers do have the images module there.

ThemeReview count
https://mapcomplete.osm.be/pets (incl 14 reviews made under the previous name ‘dog’)35
https://mapcomplete.osm.be/toerisme_vlaanderen29
https://mapcomplete.osm.be/shops28
https://mapcomplete.osm.be/food18
https://mapcomplete.osm.be/playgrounds16
https://mapcomplete.osm.be/cafes_and_pubs14
https://mapcomplete.osm.be/personal14
https://mapcomplete.osm.be/campersite9
https://mapcomplete.osm.be/sport_pitches9
https://mapcomplete.osm.be/fritures8
https://mapcomplete.osm.be/climbing7
https://mapcomplete.osm.be/onwheels3
https://mapcomplete.osm.be/hackerspaces1
lgbtmap (theme on a fork)1

Language

At last, due to the full client URL being saved, we also know what language the user interface was in when the review was made:

languagecount
en77
nl37
de27
ru13
fr9
da6
es2
unkown21

Locations

And as map makers, a quick geolocation-analysis can’t miss as well.

Unsurprisingly, most of the reviews are in Europe:

All reviews

When zooming in, a clear cluster in Switzerland and Flanders is visible:

All reviews in europe

When keeping only the Reviews made with MapComplete, the cluster in Flanders remains:

All reviews in europe made with MapComplete

(Copyright: pins are Mangrove Reviews, background map is OpenStreetMap of course)

Conclusions

So, no big conclusions and surprises in this little analysis. The reviews are being used - but not very much, especially in comparison with the image-upload feature. Placing the reviews higher up might help or including in into the questions flow. The core question is how important reviews are within the vision of MapComplete.

As usual, data is available online here, script is here