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

[Ulf Lamping]

Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists) schrieb:
> 
> Agreed. I've been the victim of bot changes over the last few months which
> have been wholly inappropriate and they are a pain in the ass to deal with,

Hmmm, maybe you simply not got aware of all the changes to the better 
and only got aware of the changes that messed things up?

Is it good or bad if someone improves 1000 tags and by mistake messing 
up 1 (because of errors, missunderstandings, ...)?

BTW: I'm not related in any way to the Straße vs. Strasse 
changes/discussions! Changing a lot of stuff because the german Duden 
tells you so is (at least to me) obviously a bad idea.

> mainly because they have to be sorted out manually, which takes up valuable
> mapping/editing time. I'd be a little happier if there was plenty of
> information written in the tags about the bot and what the bot was looking
> for in the tags when it makes a change. If the user understands what the bot
> is doing and its basis plus who to contact re bugs then its less of a
> problem to revert or amend. I'd also like to see tags that have been changed
> remaining in some format in the tags, perhaps with a bot_change: namespace
> or something. 

That's easy to do if you use a real script bot, but a lot of additional 
manual work if you use tagwatch/osmxapi/JOSM to edit stuff 
(semi-)manually as I do - and I could imagine a lot of others as well.

I manually load stuff into JOSM and have a look (and not programmed a 
bot), exactly to see and prevent mistakes that would be really ugly on a 
larger scale.

> Yes, I know the data is in the history but quite frankly I
> don't have time to look at the history for each individual item to fix
> problems. I want to map.
> 

I understand you, but that's in no way related to bots, but the "OSM 
wiki way" - and simply shows our current lack of good tools for change 
management ...

Regards, ULFL

P.S: While I was doing a lot of changes in the past weeks, you were the 
only one complaining - any other reaction I got was simply positive ...