[josm-dev] The Golden Rules

[Dirk Stöcker]

On Sat, 24 Aug 2013, Frederik Ramm wrote:

> These days, I'm thinking maybe we should add something - namely a
> reference to our "mechanical edit" guidelines. Almost 100% of all
> incidents where someone makes large-scale "typo fixes" or other changes
> (random example: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/17462977)
> involve JOSM, and most of them violate the guidelines because people
> didn't think about discussing their planned changes.
>
> (Our rule is, in a nutshell: If you personally look at every object you
> change then it's fine; if however you select all objects that have a
> certain property and then change that globally without even noticing
> which countries you're editing in then that's a mechanical edit that
> requires prior discussion to make sure you're not breaking things
> inadvertently.)
>
> Then again, maybe a link to that is too special for most users. Should
> we instead add another pre-upload check that would say something like
> "you are uploading a changeset with a very large bounding box, please
> make sure you conform to the <link> guidelines" (or "you are uploading a
> very large number of new objects..." since many people seem to use JOSM
> as an uploader for homemade imports as well).
>
> Thoughts?

I doubt that upload checks will really be helpful, as already today we 
have the problem, that even error-state validator warnings get ignored.

I understand your intend, but actually I don't really see a solution for 
these.

On one side JOSM is the accepted expert tool. It allows to use it in a 
very broad range of situations. I don't intent to limit that as e.g. Bruce 
suggests. OSM developed very well and very likely the high freedom is a 
major part in that development.

On the other hand that freedom allows everybody to do a lot of damage when 
misused.

Maybe this warning idea is less disturbing than an new dialog: When in 
non-expert mode we could display an on map note (like for filter), which 
shows a link to the guideline, when we have to large bounding box or too 
many changed objects. For non-experts it is more likely that they don't do 
that on purpose.

Ciao
-- 
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)