[OSM-talk] Disable Potlatch finally.

[Peter Miller]

On 16 Dec 2008, at 17:21, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 4:49 PM, Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
>> Absolutely. Wikipedia haven't succumbed  to the "Disable TextArea
>> Finally" campaign, despite how easy it is to make mistakes when
>> editing pages. I'm glad I don't have to download a java program in
>> order to fix typos :-P
>
> Wikipedia has watchlists, recent changes and observable histories.
> It's easy to roll back mistakes. This isn't the case with OSM
> (although it might be once 0.6 is out). For instance someone deleted a
> landuse area I added some time in the last three months and I don't
> even have the first idea how to begin tracking down who did it. when,
> and how to restore it.
>
Please excuse the self promotion, but OSM Mapper (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/OSM_Mapper 
) does currently allow one to monitor for changes to ways in a watched  
area which you can then monitor using RSS. It does not currently spot  
deletions and does not current monitor changes to node features (only  
changes to ways). We will however be adding that functionality in the  
new year but it is useful already to spot most vandalism and also to  
spot and welcome new contributors in your patch.

I am very keen for data to be entered as 'sessions' with a check in  
text message - I am not sure if 0.6 will achieve this but hope it  
will. We make up our own sessions for OSM Mapper based on a time lag  
between submissions. I am also keen that transaction locking ensures  
that we don't ever have messed up coastline because someone broke the  
coastline 10 seconds before midnight and the mended it 10 seconds  
after midnight which causes problems for the planet file. There are  
other cases where this will cause problems. I recently took a section  
of trunk road apart locally after some major road modifications and  
was conscious that for a short period of time the data was unusable on  
the server. I would have preferred to make all my changes locally then  
press submit and add into a text box a message about what I had done  
(as with wikipedia).



Regards,


Peter

> This is in no way a comment against Potlatch or any editor in
> particular, but rather against the sentiment that editors don't have
> to be careful because we can always revert changes, we can't for all
> intents and purposes without using external powertools, unlike
> Wikipedia.
>
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