[OSM-talk] Brainstorming: Simple Revert-Tools

[Peter Miller]

On 2 Sep 2009, at 22:35, Peter Körner wrote:

> Peter Miller schrieb:
>> On 2 Sep 2009, at 21:52, MP wrote:
>>>> Until this is possible I want to try to (or at least collect all
>>>> necessary information to) write an external tool for this.
>>> Adding "revert" to main site could attract vandals (ok, let's just
>>> revert stuff) or experimentators (what does this button do?). I  
>>> think
>>> better would be to have it as external tool that can either revert  
>>> or
>>> prepare file for reverting (so that it would be loaded, checked and
>>> uploaded in JOSM) - reverting should be easy, but not that easy,  
>>> that
>>> it would suffice to click one button to revert.
>>>
>>
>> Only 'established users' can upload images to Wikipedia and I  
>> would  suggest that the revert option is only available to  
>> established OSM  users. It would need to take many edits to get  
>> 'established' but it  means that there are some controls on 'drive- 
>> by vandals' who register  and then cause mischief. I guess one can  
>> loose one's 'established  user' credentials by partaking in  
>> vandalism.
> I don't think the number of edits is a good indicator of beeing  
> established. How about the time beeing an OSM member? Half a year  
> (maybe with activity every month) would be better, I think.

Registering, moving one node and then waiting for 6 months doesn't  
seem to be a good indicator of being a 'good citizen'

Making 10 changesets of more than 10 features each over a period of at  
least 2 weeks without attracting reverts or complaints should be  
sufficient I would have thought. That would mean that a newbie who  
gets on with it can be 'established' within 2 weeks. I think that was  
how long it took me to get rights to upload images to Wikipiedia. Some  
vandals will slip through, but that is fine - we can deal with them in  
the usual way.

>
>> For a simple single changeset a revert might often be  good,  
>> however sometimes one might decide one needed to revert a part  of  
>> the dataset wholesale. Not sure why.
> Our cool-tool could allow this as well.

Great.
>
> I'm thinking of a list of all changes with the option to choose an  
> action (revert, keep, revert tag(s), revert position, ...) So you  
> could mark those things that should stay as "ignore", leave the rest  
> as "revert" and let the tool do the work.

Sounds great.

I think the main message is 'please don't wait for permission to  
develop this' and get going! I love you practical energy on this. I  
agree that a web-service would be better that a downloadable tool - I  
would be much more likely to use a web-service, but any tool is better  
than no tool.

What we need now is for people to just get on with it and make tools  
and try them cautiously on small test edits and then try them on  
bigger stuff so we are ready for the big nightmare vandalism that  
could well occur before anyone attempts it. I can think of some very  
bad scenarios where people do very political edits to strategic parts  
of the map where it would generate a lot of press that would be read  
by millions of people. If we are not ready when it strikes we will  
descend again into a bear-pit of accusation and counter-accusation  
while leaving the graffiti in place for everyone to continue to write  
about - just think of some of the negative press that Wikipiedia as  
had over the recent years. The more high-profile users we get the more  
opportunity we have for big vandalism stories.


Regards,




Peter


>
> Peter
>