[OSM-talk] Vandalism in Trumpington

[Richard Fairhurst]

Frederik Ramm wrote:

> Is the fact that Potlatch does live editing a design decision, or are
> there technical reasons behind it (i.e. it would be much more
> difficult to have a Flash editor with a "save" button)?

It's a design decision. If you do "buffered editing", you have to a)  
do conflict management, b) visualise unsaved changes on a map that  
stretches everywhere. Both are very serious UI challenges and  
complications for what's meant to be the newbie-friendly editor.

People occasionally make comparisons with text-based wikis like  
Wikipedia, but it's not really helpful, because they're much more  
modal: when you've edited a Wikipedia page, you either save or abort.  
You can't just leave it unsaved as you continue browsing. So if you  
translate that model to OSM, where the atoms are much smaller, you  
end up presenting a "Save/Cancel" dialogue box on every deselect,  
which is a UI disaster.

For this reason, the issue would be largely solved - as David  
suggests - by requiring those who aren't sure what they're doing to  
actively choose between "Edit" and "Play". The sole reason this  
hasn't been done yet is really that lots of people want lots of  
features in Potlatch and those which are mentioned most on the  
mailing lists/users' diaries/forum tend to get done first. This  
doesn't come up much, so it hasn't been. It will be. In fact I'm  
kinda tempted just to do it this evening because it's probably a  
whole lot easier, and less typing, than a protracted mailing list  
debate.

(The issue would be _completely_ solved by doing this _and_ making  
Potlatch easier to use in general, i.e. pop-up help, fewer obscure  
keypresses, etc. It's an ongoing thing.)

If you want buffered editing, use JOSM. And at that point I could get  
onto the subject of "are we - in particular, the wiki - encouraging  
people to run [use JOSM] before they can walk [use Potlatch]", but  
that's a whole nuther kettle of fish. ;)

cheers
Richard