[Osmf-talk] Future of DWG work, copyright, vandalism

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Thu Jun 7 15:10:19 UTC 2012


Guttorm,

On 06/07/2012 04:26 PM, Guttorm Flatabø wrote:
> Coming from Wikipedia, the most important "drawback" as it currently
> stands, that I see, is that the DWG has to handle all these issues in
> the first place, and that they are handled on a non-web and less open
> medium that a mailinglist is. I really miss to contact editors on "talk
> pages" and discuss edits and objects publicly in a similar way to how it
> is done with talk pages on Wikipedia (all pages on Wikipedia has a talk
> page).

I don't like the "user talk page instead of email" concept that most 
people in Wikipedia seem to cherish. I think that the *default* for 
user-to-user communication should be that the communication is private. 
But I fully agree with you that it should be *possible* to have a public 
communication.

Ideally though, such communication should not be on the user page, but 
tied to changesets. It would be great if you could add comments to any 
changesets, and maybe even have a thumbs up/thumbs down feature for a 
changeset.

This is a feature that has been talked about a lot, and I believe that 
at some point Serge Wroclawski was working on something like it but I 
don't know the status.

Such a feauture would make it obvious that others have already 
complained about a changeset, and would also tell you at a glance if a 
certain user produces only changesets that everyone complains about.

> Vandals could be "marked" so others see there have been
> issues with them before, and you wouldn't have to be a member of a
> mailing list (which is a pretty exotic phenomenon for most internet
> users I'd argue) to be involved.

Frankly, writing personal messages to other users onto a public wiki 
page always struck *me* as quite exotic ;)

>     We simply do not have the manpower to actually research cases like
>     that. We need a simple policy that allows us, or ideally the
>     community, to deal with such cases.
>
> Indeed, we need to empower the community, not only to map, but to
> effectively communicate about the data. The DWG (and the mailing list)
> should be a last resort for the hard cases, or the cases where technical
> assistance is needed.

Problem is that our community does contain a number of people who are 
very protective of "their" turf and don't like newcomers. Sometimes I am 
forwarded messages that make me cringe about those "old hands" and the 
picture of OSM they give to newcomers. Maybe we should have all 
communication in public after all...

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"




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