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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On Sat, 9 Jun 2012 01:32:39 -0700 (PDT)
Harry Wood <mail at harrywood.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.

Hm. Maybe I'm just a little bit too old fashioned then. I can see the
advantages of having edit-related communications out in the open
(ideally linked to edits/changesets and not to users, but of course
that would make it possible to have an aggregated "last comments on
edits by this user" page etc.) - i always assumed that privacy
is paramount and if users want to sent each other personal messages we
must of course allow that. But maybe we don't - users can decide to
publish their email address and then they can receive personal
messages, or they don't and then they can only receive public ones.
 
> 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.

Both would be very good to have.

> I believe this would help us to deal with suspicious
> edits much more effectively as a community.

We'd have to have something that allows you to see the "most contended
edits" in an area or so, or at least those that have attracted most
comments, so you can see where the hot issues are.

I'm a bit unsure how the whole thing needs to be designed though. I
think that generally comments should be changeset based but it is quite
possible that discussion quickly leaves the individual changeset, e.g.

User A: makes edit
User B: comments "don't make edits in my area!!!!"
User C: tells off user B for being over-protective 

or

User A: makes edit
User B: writes "don't tag cycleways like that, instead do X"
User A: disagrees and explains how he thinks cycleways need to be tagged

in both cases, the discussion has moved away from the individual
changeset to something broader, and it might not be good to hide it
away on a changeset page. But in other cases a discussion might well be
very specific to a changeset and it would therefore be out of place to
have that discussion on a user page...

> 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.

In a way, yes; but as I said, I think the discussion must at least
initially start on the changeset page and be collected there; else
you'd have to switch through the publicly viewable inboxes of all
participants to understand what is going on. The changeset would, in
many cases at least, be the natural place to start such a "thread".

Bye
Frederik