[talk-au] tagging the source of edits

[Steve Bennett]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 10:05 AM, Ben Last <ben.last at nearmap.com> wrote:
> On 28 July 2010 23:43, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I would love to know whether Yahoo or Nearmap actually gives a damn.
> Obviously I can's peak for Yahoo (I think I should spell that "Yahoo!") but
> NearMap does care; we worked hard to make sure that our PhotoMaps could be
> used as the basis for OpenStreetMap, we want to support OSM and seeing
> "nearmap" as the source is a direct reflection of that :)  Plus our images
> are usable under CC-BY-SA, so the BY part is addressed by setting the
> source.

Hmm, shouldn't we be using attribution=nearmap in that case? The two
concepts are related but not quite the same. The source is (should
be?) an internal marker for quality control, so we know where we got
the data from, the attribution should be for giving credit.

An example where this distinction might matter would be generating
maps for an area and printing a list of the values of any attribution
tags within that area. You wouldn't want to show all source=* tags
(Credits: Nearmap, survey, gps, Yahoo, MMBW...), but you would want to
show attribution=* tags: (Credits: Nearmap, ABS).

(I am, currently, a very loyal source=nearmap tagger :))

> Personally, I'd welcome some more clarity on the use of the source tag when
> editing existing features.  We're working on providing easy edit access from
> our site to correct or add names to streets, and to add address-related
> information.  Where a street name is added or corrected via our site, our
> current approach is to add or modify the source tag to be "nearmap", but
> yesterday I was (coincidentally) looking at whether we should be appending
> to any existing source so that we don't inadvertently remove attribution.

A similar situation exists when there is no existing source tag. If
it's a long way and I'm modifying a small part of it, I sometimes set
a tag of "source=unknown;nearmap".

> basis of the derived data is enough attribution to comply; Potlatch does
> that automatically.

It's not totally automatic: you have to press 'b'.

Steve