[HOT] Validation

Blake Girardot bgirardot at gmail.com
Mon Feb 16 05:55:52 UTC 2015


Hi John,

It is a difficult question you ask as I feel the same way you and Nick 
do, I really don't want to invalidate squares to avoid discouraging people.

I tend to almost never invalidate a square unless it is obvious that 
someone clicked "done" thinking that meant they were just "done" looking 
at it.

So, depending on how much mapping there is to do I usually:

Just do the mapping if it is less than 15 mins worth and make sure to 
let the person who marked it done thank you for the mapping, there was a 
bit more to do so I finished it up. I will also often just map it even 
if it is longer than 15 mins but I end up validating a lot less if that 
is the case on a lot of squares.

Unlock a task square and then just directly message the person and ask 
them if they could map a bit more. I only do this if we are talking a 
square completed in the past day or two.

Unlock the task square and find another one to hopefully validate 
quicker if my time is limited. I know this is a terrible solution.

There are probably some programmatic things to improve the situation 
that could be done:

1. Dialog box on marking "Done" that asks "Are you sure you have mapped 
everything in the 'Entities to map' field?"

2. Maybe reverse what we have now: No mail gets sent when something is 
invalidated and mail gets sent when something is validated. I don't know 
how many people come back to map if their task square gets invalidated 
anyway, especially if it is weeks or months later so we might not be 
gaining anything by sending the invalidated notice and just discouraging 
people.

I think we would gain a lot more if people got notices of the good job 
they did instead.

And then we wouldn't feel bad to invalidate a task square so it can get 
the attention it needs and we can move on to validate more tasks.

That might be a good simple start, just stop sending the 'invalidated' 
notices.

Thank you for bringing it up, the validation process is tricky and subtle.

Cheers,
Blake




On 2/16/2015 12:55 AM, john whelan wrote:
> Mapping in Africa from satellite images I find I'm adding perhaps half a
> dozen settlements when I validate, they're quite quick and easy to do.
> Some are huts and are not quite so easy to spot.
>
> Question at what point should I invalidate?  The question arises when
> perhaps I've added a dozen settlements and half a dozen highways, I'm
> fairly experienced so fairly comfortable the work is OK after I've added
> in the validation but there is the question that I've added a dozen
> settlements and no one else will be validating.
>
> I'm looking more for pragmatic answers more than anything else, there is
> a concern that if I invalidate a tile it may demotivate a mapper and at
> the moment we have a lot of tiles to map.
>
> Thanks
>
> Cheerio John
>
>
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