[OSM-newbies] Sandbox and history

[Uwe Geuder]

Hi!

As my first edits in OSM I intended to make some smaller improvements and additions to the streets in my neighbourhood.
But of course I'd like to avoid doing any damage to existing work.

2 questions came up:

1. Most Wikis have a sandbox, where you can just play around and test what your ideas will look like in the system. Does OSM have a sandbox?

2. I think I've read somewhere that you don't have to be afraid of breaking anything, because OSM is under version management, just like a Wiki. However, when looking in the Web interface and in JOSM I couldn't see how to compare different versions or how fetch a previous version. Actually no hints to any version management at all.

Looking at some XML data I saw timestamps and a visible=true attribute. (but the attribute was indeed true in all data I happend to retrieve). These could probably be used to build version managent, but I don't think that's the level the average user wants to act on.

Regards,

Uwe