[OSM-talk] Brainstorming: Simple Revert-Tools

[Peter Körner]

How whow what a great post. Thank you for that! I was nodding most of 
the time while reading :)

> Yes, I would like to see a revert function available to which I could 
> give a changeset to and it would revert all the changes made to the 
> database within that changeset. It must flag the changes as being made 
> by me and being made using that tool (I must take responsibility for the 
> decision to revert and the tool must also be identified as it has some 
> responsibility for the quality of the revert). Would the tool be 
> something that ran on my computer? Possibly.
I'd like to have a web-interface as this would make interaction with 
others much more easy. Also the example [2] shows the great power of the 
crowd and I'd like to make as much use of this as possible. And finally 
I'm a Web-Developer :)

> A good tool will need to be able to do this even when some changes have 
> been made on top of the changeset and possibly highlight a few issues 
> that cannot be reverted because of conflicts.
In cases where it's unable to solve a conflict automatically it should 
give logical proposals but also allow completely free edits on all nodes 
(including none-conflicting)

> A good might be able to review all the changes made by a particular user 
> over a period of time and list the status of the features before and 
> after to assess what the user is doing and if there is any sense to it 
> or what. It should be possible to revert multiple changesets by one user 
> in this way.
It should also show which changes already have been reverted to show how 
others think about them.

I think I might be able to build such a tool around the mid of 
September, maybe even a little later. If s/o else wants to, feel free.
I put

[.. very good ideas about a monitoring-tool, which is out of my current 
scope]

> A good set of tools will allow us to revert vandalism within minutes.
And should not make intentional vandalism more easy than it is to day.

> Please can a bunch of coders get on with producing support for this 
> important work.
The biggest issue in writing those tools is planning them. When a tool 
is planned from A-Z, it's coded within days. So come on and discuss 
further how you'd like to work with this tool, so that we're able to 
build it.

> You could check the tool on the edits made over the previous two months 
> by Liam123, some of which have still not been reverted for lack of a 
> suitable tool to achieve it.
Thank you for that hint, i'll do this.


I pushed all collected ideas to [3]. I signed your input with a link to 
your mail in the archives, hope this is ok. While discussion goes on 
here I'll try to copy the good points to that page.


Peter

[2] cassini.toolserver.org/~mazder/multilingual-country-list/
[3] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Change_rollback