[josm-dev] Author assigned to road not edited by me. Bug or newbie mistake?

[Gabriel Ebner]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 11:19:55PM +0100, Franz Apeltauer wrote:
> My questions:
> - What should I avoid in the future?
>    Was this a newbie mistake or did I find a bug?
>    (No such bug found in Trac.)

No, this is not your mistake.  The authors window just shows the user name it
gets from www.openstreetmap.org, which happens to be the user who did the last
modification to the way.

In short:  This is how it is meant to be.  (Although the title 'authors' is a
bit misleading.)

> - How can I give the road back to the real author?

The author that is shown is not the one who "owns" the road.  In fact, there
is no such thing as way ownership or node ownership in OSM (at least as far as
it concerns the server; you might feel affectionate towards "your" area and
try to keep it clean, but that's completely unofficial).  The closest thing
you can get to answering "who originally drew this road?", is the history API
call:

$ GET http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.5/way/80/history
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<osm version="0.5" generator="OpenStreetMap server">
  <way id="80" visible="true" timestamp="2007-10-03T16:47:49+01:00" user="robotnic">
    <nd ref="377992"/>
    <!-- ... -->
    <tag k="highway" v="primary"/>
    <tag k="created_by" v="Potlatch alpha"/>
    <tag k="name" v="Hütteldorfer Straße"/>
  </way>
  <way id="80" visible="true" timestamp="2007-10-07T14:36:04+01:00" user="Gabriel Ebner">
    <nd ref="4546559"/>
    <!-- ... -->
    <tag k="name" v="Hütteldorfer Straße"/>
    <tag k="created_by" v="Potlatch alpha"/>
    <tag k="highway" v="primary"/>
  </way>
  <way id="80" visible="true" timestamp="2007-10-12T16:27:59+01:00" user="Gabriel Ebner">
    <nd ref="4546559"/>
    <!-- ... -->
    <tag k="name" v="Hütteldorfer Straße"/>
    <tag k="created_by" v="Potlatch alpha"/>
    <tag k="highway" v="secondary"/>
  </way>
</osm>

Here you can see all the people who modified this way.  (Though you'll see no
edits before october 2007 due to the introduction of API 0.5 -- the creation
of way 80 was somewhere in early 2006 if I remember correctly.)

  Gabriel.