[OSM-talk] Potlatch :-)

[Richard Fairhurst]

Ulf Lamping wrote:

> That's the usage model I would expect. That's the same model every  
> wiki
> page works that I know of (which has at least some similiarity).

I know what you mean, but it's not actually a simple comparison.

In some ways the current Potlatch model is pretty similar to  
Mediawiki (or Usemod Wiki, or whatever), despite the lack of an  
explicit "Save" button. The "atom" is a page in Mediawiki, or a way  
in OSM. It is a single discreet unit with minimal dependencies and  
which can largely be viewed in one edit window. In half an hour's  
editing, you might edit 30 Mediawiki pages or 30 OSM ways, and  
there's an explicit save action for each one - albeit that Potlatch  
implements it through deselect, not a button.

There is absolutely no way I'm going to require users to click "Save"  
per way/POI - that would be a usability disaster. So any such change  
would have to be a "commit unsaved changes" model. But that has  
serious UI issues too. Your changes might have been made half an hour  
ago and be 25 miles off-screen, so you don't actually know what  
you're saving, whereas now it's all visible on-screen. You have to  
have conflict management: that's really hard for a newbie to get  
their head around, never mind the 412 errors, and runs the risk of  
introducing severe db problems if there are coding mistakes or  
oversights. And so on.

I do see where you're coming from and it's something that I've been  
considering since Potlatch was first in development - some of those  
at the Oxford dev day when we finished the Rails port will recall the  
discussions. But it's not a simple decision.

To my mind the recent changes to Potlatch (removal of anonymous  
edits, introduction of undelete/history, fixing "revert merged ways"  
issue) go most of the way. There is still the issue that you are not  
explicitly forced to choose between practice and edit mode (i.e. it  
defaults to edit mode), with some strong on-screen documentation  
exhorting you to practise first; this is on the list, I just haven't  
got around to it yet. (And more documentation is needed in general,  
but that's a whole-OSM problem.)

I guess the reason I suddenly stopped being "mild-mannered" on the  
subject (sorry Frederik :) ) is that the continual sniping from a few  
people, historically either on talk-de or from German users on talk,  
bears absolutely no relation to the reality that I see on the map -  
and I do a lot of editing across a big swathe of England and Wales.  
There really is _no_ systemic problem with Potlatch edits. As I've  
said before, most of the bad edits I see (low-resolution ways, stray  
nodes) actually originate from JOSM users, and I'm not blaming the  
tool for that.

My guess is that there is a small number of newbie anonymous users in  
Germany who are very keen and doing a lot of work, but haven't really  
got the hang of this yet. Now the entire point of the change to  
disable anonymous edits is that you can now track these guys down and  
shoot^H^H^H^H^H help them.

Of course maybe there's something about umlauts and Eszetts that  
triggers a weird way-deleting bug in Potlatch, in which case I hümbly  
apologiße. :)

cheers
Richard