[Talk-us] semi-apology Re: "Screw-up" of borders

Toby Murray toby.murray at gmail.com
Sat Mar 26 05:33:42 GMT 2011


On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 8:46 PM, Nathan Edgars II <neroute2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd like to apologize for specifically naming ToeBee and Techlady in subject
> lines, and any connotation that may have been attached to "screwup". The
> former was my error at reading the tea leaves of node histories, and the
> latter was Techlady's error but perhaps my overreaction.

> If this sounds forced and meaningless, I apologize for the way I am.

Thanks. I was most upset by your immediate attempt to revert my
changeset without waiting for any discussion. Especially considering
how many objects were involved and the fact that the changeset in
question obviously did a lot more than just moving border nodes
around. I have seen errors in some of your large changesets too but I
have never considered doing a complete revert. I fix what I know and
move on.

> I am disturbed by the way people don't seem to care that the data can be so
> easily damaged and so hard to fix. I've seen other inadvertent damage, such
> as where someone selects a road and hits T to force it to a straight line,
> last for years. Even worse was where someone had turned a boundary into a
> circle; luckily I was able to revert that one without conflict.

I won't disagree with this. But to some degree that is unavoidable in
a crowdsourced environment. We can always make the tools better but
new users will always find a way to break something. That's why there
is a community to watch out for mistakes, discuss them when they
happen and then take appropriate action to correct them.

As it applies specifically to boundaries, I would point back to my
suggestion a week or two ago (maybe sent to talk) that JOSM come with
a default filter enabled that prevents administrative boundaries from
being edited. When I am not editing boundaries, I usually have such a
filter enabled for myself anyway. Does P2 have any kind of filtering
capabilities? Would be nice to do the same there.

In this instance, the original error made by techlady was an accident.
I believe she was editing roads in the border area and happened to
grab the state border and ended up moving the whole thing. I've done
similar things many times and have seen the results of others doing it
too. JOSM is pretty good about catching such mistakes on big objects
and slapping you for it. I intentionally do not disable that popup
warning even though it can be annoying when I really am working with
large objects.

Anyway, I'm glad we were able to resolve the Colorado border problem.

Toby



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