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

[Matt Amos]

On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 12:30 AM, Frederik Ramm<frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Matt Amos wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I might not have been clear enough here. It is plain obvious that this idea
> will not protect anything against editing.
...
> It is actually a kind of human-to-human
> messaging system, not a secret super duper automatic bot revert edit protect
> whatever.

maybe not obvious enough ;-)

>> On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 9:27 PM, Erik Johansson<emj at kth.se> wrote:
>>> 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.

> This whole idea deals only with
> the well-meaning half of the universe - with people who actually *want* to
> know that someone else considered a certain object "special" and "not to be
> edited without good reason".

forgive me for being pessimistic, but i think there are probably some
people who consider all their edits to be "special" and "not to be
edited".

on the other hand, what's a good reason? aren't the vast majority of
edits made for a good reason, i.e: to improve the data?

> Of course it would make sense (and not render the system useless!) to
> implement the scheme in editors and have the editor display a pop-up note
> saying something like "the previous editor of this item has specially
> flagged this item <list source tag> <list changeset comment> <....>, do you
> want to upload your change anyway?".

i think it would make even more sense if said editor could sign up on
some server, flag his or her "special" elements there and get emails
or an RSS feed of the changes.

is it better to try and prevent people editing, or give editors the
tools to monitor areas they care about?

cheers,

matt