[OSM-talk] Potlatch and the destruction of good work (N6 Ireland)

[David Earl]

On 26/07/2007 09:46, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> As has already been observed, the issue isn't specific to Potlatch  
> (phew!); and edits are already 'tagged', never anonymous.

In the case of Ireland, the changes were apparently deliberate and 
someone thought they were dong something useful. Any tool would have 
this problem.

But the changes in Cambridge were random movements of nodes and 
scribbles. I don't know for sure, but I think someone was just playing 
with Potlatch to try it out, probably not realising what they were doing 
was actually changing the production data, so the lack of a Save or 
Commit Changes does make Potlatch more problematic than JOSM.

Undo would be great, but wouldn't help in that situation, because they 
wouldn't realise they'd done anything that needed undoing. The 
'immediate change' paradigm is fundamental to Potlatch, so it is hard to 
see what the solution to that is. Maybe just making it clearer that you 
really are changing live data.

BTW, I used Potlatch to make a quick change to a street name that I'd 
got wrong yesterday. I wasn't clear: do you update with every character 
change, or do I have to move the focus out of the field for the change 
to happen, so if I type the new name and close the browser, has my 
change happened or not?

David