[OSM-dev] A new take on the "mutable" idea

[Matt Amos]

On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 9:27 PM, Erik Johansson<emj at kth.se> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 4:29 AM, Russ Nelson<russ at cloudmade.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Jun 19, 2009, at 6:49 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>>>  or alternatively make it easy to spot whether such data may
>>> have been changed by accident.
>>
>> There are a lot of reasons to have this facility.  It matches in
>> concept with Wikipedia's "watchlist".
>
> Osmxapi gives you watch lists, just tag a couple of node, way or
> relations with watch:mrRuzzy=immutable_data and you can watch it in
> xapi:

having a watchlist (a set of bboxes and/or elements to watch for
changes) would be fantastic, and wouldn't require superfluous tags.
all the server-side technology to do it is already in place.

> But regarding what Frederik says. Communicating your desires to/onto
> other OSM users has always been the hardest part of OSM.

we have user messaging for this reason. but if your desire is "stop
editing my stuff - you don't know what you're doing", that's not
exactly productive. it's tempting to call unwanted edits "vandalism",
but it's good to remember the unofficial OSM motto: "never attribute
to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" :-)

> If you had that live feed of OSM data changes then you could setup
> your own server that did rollbacks on all immutable data violation
> edits. But: Kind of sucks  to have your data rolledback without you
> knowing it,

bots are bad, m'kay? especially if the person who "violates" the
immutable rule has his own revert server. also, this system becomes
useless the moment someone teaches an editor to automatically apply
the signature or immutable rule.

> even having a dialog saying "you are too stupid, don't
> edit this" might be a bit sucky.

and a little off-putting to potential contributors.

cheers,

matt