[OSM-talk] Make OSM more Wiki-like

[Jochen Topf]

On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 02:15:52AM +0100, Dirk-Lüder Kreie wrote:
> I was wondering if there is a way to make OSM more wiki-like, especially
> with respect to the history of any item, allowing to see who has edited
> what and when for every contributor, that way if things happen like last
> year's auto-conversion of segments in Hamburg to highway=unclassified
> tagged ways, one can if not easily revert, then at least notify the
> person doing the conversions that he is doing more harm than good.
> Actually having a sort-of "watchlist" for the nodes, segments and ways
> one has created or modified would help even more.
> 
> I'm bringing this issue up again, because a similar thing has happened
> in Bremen, where I and Etric Celine map, and there were segments that
> should be ways with railway=rail or railway=tram that had been converted
> to highway=unclassified ways. luckily all my ways that had
> highway=unclassified had also the name attribute, so selecting the
> automatically converted ways in JOSM was not too difficult, and I only
> accidentally killed 2 ways of Etric Celine which didn't have the name
> tag (I notified him of my proceedings).
> 
> So in my eyes OSM basically needs a better vandalism control, of the
> sort of the "many eyeballs" principle, with adequate tools for everyone
> to at least identify the perpetrator of (accidental or willfull) vandalism.

+1

I also would like to have "commit notes", like in subversion of in
typical wikis where you can add a note about your changes when commiting
a change. This would be things like "added the suburb of X" or "changed
all tags X to Y because of the discussion we had on the list. See URL
for details" or so. That way it would be easier for people to follow
what is happening in their area and to not start "edit wars", because
people have different ideas on how something should be tagged.

In practice JOSM would pop up a box asking for such a note when you push
the "upload to osm" button and then associate everything uploaded with
this note. This would, of course, need some database and API changes.

And while we are at it: Maybe this could also be used to add hints for
the tile rendering. So there could be another checkbox saying "check
this if this is a major change and tiles should be re-rendered". This
would only be a hint for the re-render decision algorithm, not a
command. I am not sure whether thats really needed though. The number of
changes itself would probably be enough to detect this and people might
get into the habit of always checking this box rendering it useless.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298