[OSM-talk] immutable=yes Fwd: DEC Lands

[Ted Mielczarek]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Russ Nelson <russ at cloudmade.com> wrote:

> Okay, taking you somewhat more seriously now, the ideology that Ted is
> driving is that everything in OSM should be editable by everyone, and
> nobody has any better edits to make than anyone else, and everybody
> gets an equal vote, and if you change something and I change it back,
> well, those are just two votes and who are you to override me or me
> override you, and when somebody moves a way five miles long over by
> one hundred feet and screws up hundreds of roads, well, that was just
> an edit, and how can an edit be wrong?
>

I never said that everyone's edits were equal, just that all the data should
be equal in the eyes of the database. I have no problem with you importing
this data, monitoring it, and reverting edits that look incorrect, the same
way that I pay attention to my local area and would revert vandalism or
misguided edits. But yes, I do believe that *everyone* should have that same
right. Nobody gets a special privilege just because they brought a certain
data import to the party. As others have said, the wikiness of OSM is the
central concept here. Even if I never have reason to edit your data, I
object on principle that we should have data in OSM that is not editable, as
I feel it violates the spirit of OSM.

I have spent countless hours mapping my area, and a lot of that data is
arguably the best it's going to get. Any edits by a random user (ban
potlatch etc) are more likely to make the data worse, yet I would never
argue that it should be uneditable or locked down in some way. The wiki
model means you have to take the bad with the good. Clearly we will need to
get better tools for change monitoring and easy rollback, but people are
working on these things, and it's just a software problem.

-Ted
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