[Moderation] Welcome to the first 20 subscribers!

[David Earl]

My motivation for joining this group is (a) a desire to protect the very 
large investment of my time into OSM over the last 3 years, and (b) that 
I have already been dealing with quite a few cases of intentional 
vandalism and accidental modifications.

I think there are quite a few things that I think would help:

1. Set up an area mentoring system. Many of us already do this 
informally; we could make this more systematic.

2. Modify ITO OSMMapper to (a) spot node changes and (b) work via 
changesets sessions to map more closely to OSM rather than the time 
based system that was established before changesets were implemented.

3. Tools to see more easily what has changed (colour coding tag changes 
to highlight the differences, drawing lines of old and new locations to 
show position changes). The delay in rendering Mapnik ironically meant 
that you could do this by seeing the new data tracks on the old 
rendering but now that's not possible any more.

4. Review/moderate changesets for new users and suspect users; also 
perhaps users whose changes range over a wide area either within one 
change set or ones close together in time. Until a change is reviewed 
the objects concerned are locked so we have the freedom to accept or 
reject the changes without further changes getting in the way.

5. Online revert tool. Perhaps only accessible to people who have passed 
some criteria, no doubt contentious as to what those should be. Though 
being able to revert your own changesets should be unrestricted. The 
tool needs to give more information than currently available about what 
conflicts arise and how they should be dealt with.


I think there's also possibly an argument for broadening the issue to 
one of quality control. For example, maybe all changes should be 
reviewed by someone else before being accepted, in the same way many 
companies operate a code review process.

David