[josm-dev] The Golden Rules

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Fri Aug 23 23:49:37 UTC 2013


Hi,

   at the bottom of our MotD it says:

"Remember the golden rules of OpenStreetMap:
* Don't copy from other maps
* Have fun!"

A long time ago I deleted a third item from that list, I think it was
something like "always be correct" or "precise" or something that
sounded too intimidating.

These days, I'm thinking maybe we should add something - namely a
reference to our "mechanical edit" guidelines. Almost 100% of all
incidents where someone makes large-scale "typo fixes" or other changes
(random example: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/17462977)
involve JOSM, and most of them violate the guidelines because people
didn't think about discussing their planned changes.

(Our rule is, in a nutshell: If you personally look at every object you
change then it's fine; if however you select all objects that have a
certain property and then change that globally without even noticing
which countries you're editing in then that's a mechanical edit that
requires prior discussion to make sure you're not breaking things
inadvertently.)

Then again, maybe a link to that is too special for most users. Should
we instead add another pre-upload check that would say something like
"you are uploading a changeset with a very large bounding box, please
make sure you conform to the <link> guidelines" (or "you are uploading a
very large number of new objects..." since many people seem to use JOSM
as an uploader for homemade imports as well).

Thoughts?

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"



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