[OSM-talk] A plea for meaning ful changeset comments

[Ulf Lamping]

Am 31.07.2010 14:05, schrieb Frederik Ramm:
> I, too, find your attitude funny. You spend an hour doing edits, then
> cannot be bothered to spend a minute to think of a good changeset
> comment.

That's one thing I want to do and the other I often find a burden to 
enter. What's so funny about that?

> Instead, you say, it is the job of all the others who want to
> make sense of your edit to investigate, and spend certianly more than
> that one minute.

Is this the same Frederik that preached all the time: Its the consumers 
job to make sense out of the data, not the mappers job?

> That is indeed selfish, because you're saying that your time is more
> valuable than theirs.

If someone doesn't tag all possible data of a place, is he also selfish? 
By your definition: yes. Because someone else then needs to revisit that 
place to add more details and spend probably a lot more time than necessary.

OSM has a long tradition to *not* force people to enter all possible 
data, but only the things that someone *wants* to add. This principle 
worked pretty well in the past.

You failed to explain why a different principle should be applied to 
changeset comments now. "It helps some people" is certainly *not* enough 
to force how others have to spend their time.

> I'd appreciate very much if, in the future, you would contribute 1% less
> data and use the saved time to double the value of your contribution by
> telling your fellow mappers what you did in a changeset comment.

"double the value of your contribution" - really? When I add the address 
to an existing hotel node, it won't be a lot more valueable if I add a 
comment "address of hotel added". But it almost doubles the time I need.

You failed to explain why adding changeset comments all the time is 
sooooo valueable that it's necessary to force people to spend their time 
as you want to see it.

BTW: A map will have *no* additional value wether I add that comment or not.

> And as I said to John, blaming insufficient tools is a cheap excuse.

I'm not blaming insufficient tools. However, if we would have sufficient 
tools, a lot of your reasons to force people to add comments would 
simply vanish away.

> This is about paying respect to your fellow mappers, about being part of
> a community rather than just someone who dumps data onto a heap ("let
> the others make sense of this").

Would be nice if you would pay respect how others want to spend their 
time and not telling them what they have to do.

On our last local NFE OSM meeting, we had a short talk if anyone uses 
changeset comments. Turned out that anyone attending found it to be a 
burden. So "my" fellow mappers seem to look at it quite differently than 
you.

> That is most certainly a selfish
> attitude. Just because you upload a change to OSM doesn't mean you're
> automatically not selfish. There are indeed people who spend their spare
> time mapping stuff and add it to OSM and half the community goes "oh my
> god, can't that guy contribute to another project, he's stubborn,
> doesn't communicate about his edits, and does things all of us think
> wrong". You know we have several such cases in Germany on the regional
> and national level.

That's a pitty. But if someone is entering bullshit, does it help us to 
force him to also enter a valueable comment about his bullshit? ;-)

> You don't want to put yourself on a level with them,
> do you?

So we're already at the moral level of: "if you don't add a valueable 
comment, you're a potential spammer/vandal" :-(


I'm not arguing that a good comment is valuable. But it is my belief 
that forcing people (by software or by "social norms") to do things they 
don't really want to do will reduce the fun to work with OSM and 
therefore do more harm than good to the project in the long run.

Regards, ULFL