[Talk-de] Potlatch, die Siebenundzwölfigste

[Henry Loenwind]

Richard Fairhurst wrote:

>> So again it boils down to "we don't want any teamwork, we only want  
>> people who randomly implement stuff on their own" and "if you want  
>> to talk about some aspect of OSM, you are not wanted here".
> 
> No, it doesn't. Talking is great (like I say, especially if you talk  
> to someone who can actually do something), but it's got past that  
> stage now.

Fair.

> I've seen several threads on talk-de complaining about Potlatch but  
> not one single person actually committing patches. I'm genuinely  
> puzzled - how do you think there are going to be any improvements if  
> you don't muck in and help? Who do you think is actually going to do  

The single problem with all threads so far is, that they ended nowhere. 
The people who started them got chased away, any suggestions got 
flamewared instead of discussed, and so on. Until now, nobody came up 
with the one-big-answer-that-solves-all.

Some good initial ideas came up, but without constructive discussion, 
they quickly died. Some were killed by the API-0.6-will-have-changesets 
hammer, some with the the-developer-will-never-implement-that axe. Oh, 
and quite often we had the that-would-kill-the-purpose-of-potlatch 
guillotine...

I see 4 major problem areas with potlatch:

* New users don't know realize that they change the live data. The new 
popup window and the start/play buttons helped, but we all know people 
will click anything if that helps them not reading any text. Also the 
map not insta-showing their changes "helps" here.

* New users don't know how to use potlatch. Having few buttons on-screen 
makes a friendly UI, but it doesn't help users to realize the full 
potential of a tool. Together with #1, we get the "oops, that was a 
mistake, close the browser window and restart"-syndrome---that works 
well with e.g. Wikipedia, but not potlatch.

* potlatch doesn't catch common errors, like not connecting ways or ways 
going A->B->A. I think someone who actually had to cleanup after a 
potlatch user can tell you more about this one.

* potlatch does not tell the user what changes are applied. So people 
can, e.g., move a way without even realizing they did.

There is a fifth problem, but that is not really a software problem:

* Random people do random edits in random areas. Meaning, that with 
potlatch you can edit anywhere in the map, you don't have a "home area". 
For all those people who have a "home area", an area they build up and 
care for and spent hours to perfect it, the typical potlatch edit (three 
changes by a person who never before has edited something in that area) 
is very intrusive.

cu
Henry

PS: My personal wishlist for potlatch with API 0.6 would be a big nice 
green(*) window saying "potlatch is now going to submit the following 
changes into the database. Please review them and enter a comment into 
the edit field below." And one or two zoom levels more, I got some 
roundabouts here, that are uneditable in potlatch because you almost 
only see a grey area with some nodes ;)

(*) green is a friendly colour, they say :-)