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

[Harry Wood]

>> On 06/07/2012 04:26 PM, Guttorm Flatabø wrote:
>> 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).

> From: Frederik Ramm
> 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.

My response to this thread was going to be the exact same thing that Guttorm Flatabø has zero'd in on here. I think it would be a very good idea to change things so that when you send a one-to-one message to somebody to discuss their edits, even though it is in essence one-to-one, it would be a public, and it should be public by default in my opinion.

This makes it easy to see if you're the first person to contact a user about something, or to join in with others if they need back-up in a debate. I believe this would help us to deal with suspicious edits much more effectively as a community. Less work for DWG. A side benefit is that we can also spot cases where OSMers are biting the newbies e.g. because they're being over-protective of their turf. At present we have no idea how much of a problem this is.

Although this idea is like the "user talk pages" on wikipedia, in OSM I'd envisage this not as a wiki page with wiki style editable discussion (which is exotic and weird) but as a simple modification of our current site's message system, essentially making a publicly viewable inbox. We'd need to display a flashing warning for a few months in case people who are not used to this are expecting the message they send to be private. It would have a public/private option, and could be introduced gradually, but eventually the etiquette would be to stick with public for most communications. It will seem odd and may take a while to get used to and establish the etiquette for.

Harry