[OSM-dev] A better way to watch nodes and ways?

[Gioele]

Hello,

could a WikiMedia-style or MusicBrainz-style submission system for nodes and 
ways be implemented for OSM?

I, like many other edits, care about all the information I have entered in 
OSM (not much right now, I'm new here). I especially care about random 
people changing or reverting things that have been hardly researched and 
edited. Other open databases suffer the same problem: the example I am more 
familiar with are Wikipedia and MusicBrainz. Both Wikipedia (WikiMedia I 
should say) and MusicBrainz allows users to subscribe to certain pages 
(WikiMedia) or Artits (MusicBrainz). When a change occurs they are notified 
via mail or feeds. Those messages usually include a link to the diff so the 
user can see whether the changes are acceptable or not.

The subscription system used by WikiMedia and MusicBrainz saves a lot of 
time to editors, especially when compared to other methods or, in general, 
to methods that does not point out what exactly has changed and how.

OpenStreetMaps has two different mechanism, both with some issues. First, 
the watch:user=1 tag. The feeds produced by the Xapi using the watch tag 
would be interesting but they don't seem to work (at least in the past 
hours) and they expose very little information. Moreover, all those tags 
pollute the database. Second, OSMMapper. OSMMapper is an interesting project 
but it is less structured than one would hope. It is based on areas so it is 
impossible for a user to follow just a street or certain nodes (f.e. 
attractions) in a crowded area. The number of commits would be just too 
high. Also, it is graphical-only tool and this reduces the ability to 
integrate it in other projects: f.e. JOSM could not use that information to 
zoom to changed ways. More, it is a separate project and I think this watch-
list stuff should be part of the main infrastructure.

Could a subscription list for users be implemented in the OSM server? JOSM 
could be used to set the user subscription on nodes and ways. A per-user 
subscription list would simplify the server code removing the need for all 
the "clever bits of code" that the Xapi wiki page talks about.

PS: is there a bug tracking system for the OSM infrastructure? All I could 
find is OpenStreetBugs but it deals with errors in the map, not in the 
infrastructure.

-- 
Gioele <gioele at svario.it>