[OSM-talk] Code of conduct for automated (mass-) edits

[Nic Roets]

Fredrik wrote : "2. Make sure your tools and knowledge are good: You have to
be able to
revert your changes if something goes wrong, and you need to keep any
collateral damage to an absolute minimum. If you cannot guarantee that,
ask someone for help who can."

If a bot writer sees this, he's either going to abandon his plans, or
continue without having these tools. A better solution is for someone to
write proper, general purpose revert tools for use by the sysadmin /
community.


>
> This is mostly what the 0.6 API is about. Changesets will report to
> you what happened, and have space for meta data (which will allow the
> identification of particular bots/editors). And that'll give a basis
> for reversion tools to operate.
>

Currently most bot writers already add identification tags to their data.
For example "tiger:", "AND_" etc. The positive side is that we can already
use those tags to track bots. The negative side is pollution : We all know
what tiger and AND refers to, but who know what sagns stands for ? Where can
we look it up ? An import in Japan has the the "note" and "note:ja" tags for
millions of objects, so if someone tries to render or index it, it may not
work for Japan.

So it's not clear that changesets will improve the bot situation. The
improvement will come from a tool that looks for a specific user or tag (or
changeset) and then change to the last revision where that user or tag was
absent. It looks like Frederik already has an unpolished version of such a
tool for 0.5.

The advantage of 0.6 will be that a client doing an upload or delete will be
required to provide the version number of the object it's modifying. This is
race condition is currently quite rare, and the easiest way to reduce the
probability of it happening is to explain your bot on the talk list of the
relevant country.


>
>
> >
> > As far as politics go, I think that it would a good idea to just re-use
> the
> > current structure for introducing new map features. Before you run a
> script
> > you first propose it and only run it when enough people cast a vote in
> favor
> > of running the script.
>
> Step 1) Write OSM bot
> Step 2) Write OSM Wiki vote rigging bot
> Step 3) Propose bot
> Step 4) Rig vote
> Step 5) Run OSM bot all the while pointing at the wiki shouting "look!
> 13 people approved it!"
>
>
Agreed.
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