[josm-dev] Change to changeset comment handling, RfD

[Russ Nelson]

Frederik Ramm writes:
 > Julien Balas wrote:
 > > I prefere some new data and no comment rather than... nothing.
 > 
 > See, that's the difference between the "data is more important" and the 
 > "community is more important" view.

I'd agree with you, call a lack of comment a lack of data, and then
say that the community is too important to go around pissing people
off by enforcing formulaic requirements on changeset comments.

 > community is "I have better things to do than explain my mapping to you 
 > geeks", then I'd rather not have their data.

Maybe you should create a fork of OSM which only has data that comes
with meaningful changeset comments?  But oh, you'd lose too much data
that way.  So maybe the data *is* more important?

The trouble here is that you can't insist on meaningful comments
because who's to say what's meaningful?  Okay, so then the tool
insists on formulaic comments, but that doesn't work because people
who feel that comments aren't necessary will simply satisfy the
formula.  And that doesn't help *at all*.

Imposing formulaic requirements of any sort is an attempt to create
community norms using technology.  Has that ever worked?  Anywhere?

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