[Talk-us] Difficult USA mapper(s)

[Jeff Meyer]

On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 9:26 PM, Russ Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:

> Martijn van Exel writes:
>  > 1) I don't think it is a good idea to come up with a code of conduct
>  > as a response to particular cases.
>
> Hard cases make bad law, yes. But it's not a difficult decision to say
> "Don't change other people's edits unless you can show that they are
> editing in variance to convention" or "Don't change an edit made by a
> local person unless you have ground truth to show that they are wrong,
> and can present that evidence to anyone who questions your edit."


But... the converse can be somewhat helpful. Particular cases can be
reasonable tests of general rules and this seems to be a pretty generic
type of conflict that should be easily resolvable. i.e.: user a and user b
disagree and cannot resolve their differences. Their discussion is isolated
that not enough other people or community are around to help moderate the
differences and reach a solution (not necessarily a compromise). What to do?

My primary interest, as a newbie, is the impact of these difficult mappers
on recruitment of new mappers. If the single difficult mapper is having a
visible conflict with one non-difficult mapper, how many negative
experiences with other non-difficult mappers aren't surfacing? The faster
you can reassure the new mappers that difficult mappers are the exception
and not the rule, and that the community is friendly and supportive, the
better.

My noob perspectives on this particular situation:

- An overarching code of behavior could be very helpful to empower the less
aggressive mapper. Maybe something simple like: Pursue the truth &
agreement & do no harm. It gives the oppressed some simple question to ask
the difficult mapper. Each of the segments of the code could be defined
separately.
  -- It seems to me that changing tags without a resolution of truth in a
community is clearly destructive

- The concept of any tag being ok is exciting for many of us, but also a
little scary to many newcomers, who would like to be sure we are doing
things properly. So, I think more standardization in tag convention would
be helpful, but that's probably fodder for another (and many older) threads.

Apologies in advance if I've missed any existing information that covers
these points!

Thanks, Jeff

-- 
Jeff Meyer
Global World History Atlas
www.gwhat.org
jeff at gwhat.org
206-676-2347
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20121103/61f83318/attachment.html>