[Openstreetmap] Editor question

[Immanuel Scholz]

Hi,

> The problem is that (with luck, in the future) there might be more than
> one person committing edits to the same place - how do you propose to deal
> with this if you've been editing offline for a significant period of time?

Edit and delete conflicts can be handled in the client with help from the
server. This includes detection if someone changed stuff you are about to
change, someone deleted objects you currently changed, you are trying to
delete something which you don't saw the latest version when deciding to
delete them etc..


I think the only think that can't be feasible protected against is if
people add a road and do not manually check whether it already added by
another in the mean time (at a slightly different position).

But this is the same as any wiki. If you don't look whether the article
you create already exist (with a slightly different name) than you will
create a double of the former entry.


The wikipedia has the advantage, that the chance is not so bad that you
choose by accident the same name as the author of the conflicting article
before you. In this case the system can detect the double add.

However, osm has the advantage that a user can far better check whether
there are already someone inserted data that might be the same he/she
currently want to add.

And yes, the applet is best for this checking, since it displays new adds
to the data very quick.

There could be heuristics implemented to try to detect possible double
inserts. ("Warning: I think someone may already added the object 'Baker
Street'. Abort uploading and jump to the place?").
I think this heuristics will be far better than any wikipedia can do for
text articles.


Ciao, Imi.