[OSM-talk] Commenting and thumbs up/down feature for changesets

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Serge Wroclawski wrote:
>> The experience on Wikipedia is that reverting a changeset is a pretty
>> offensive action to take, requiring great care. If "-1" is a vote for
>> reversion, then presumably equal care ought to be exercised. And IMHO
>> a better option is to discuss the change, rather than to simply vote
>> it down. "Hey, are you sure about tagging these as tracks, they look
>> like walking paths to me?" builds community better than "-1".
> 
> I concur. I think voting often leads to bad things. Flagging
> changesets might be useful, with some kind of metamoderation, but /as
> things stand today/, I think this goes against the spirit of the
> project because "Who decided whose a moderator".

I say it again: In my mind, a "-1" is nothing more or less than "I do 
not like this". In my mind, everyone should have a right to express that 
opinion even without giving reasons, although of course it is better if 
people say why they don't like something. You have a right to dislike a 
changeset *even* *if* *it* *complies* *with* *any* *rule* *there* *is*, 
and even if there is no objective reason whatsover for a revert. You can 
still dislike it, and say so.

And, apart from perhaps very extreme cases, I wouldn't say it is a "vote 
for reverting". Just like a -1 vote on help.openstreetmap.org, I expect 
that a changeset that has accumulated many negative votes will just sit 
there as a warning to others: "don't do this", or "don't do it this 
way", or "a majority of people who saw this disliked it".

It was maybe my fault to open this discussion pointing to a negative 
example so everyone got fixated on the "-1" button but of course there 
will be a "+1" button to, and again, everyone has the right to like 
anything.

I hope that I'll soon be able to set up a prototype of this feature and 
then we can all look at it together and we'll have a much better idea 
how it feels in practice.

Bye
Frederik

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