[OSM-talk] Revert requests in general

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Ben Last wrote:
> And I've tried to discuss it on a few occasions, and not had much of a
> response :)  We've (at this point) ruled out asking all our users to
> register separately with OSM

Maybe worth taking a clue from Cloudmade here, who have a similar 
situation with their Mapzen editor - they go through some effort to make 
the process as painless as possible for their users while still 
requiring them to register with OSM *as well as* with CM.

> Maybe my Google skills are sadly lacking, but I spent a while looking
> for information on this.  There's some discussion of the freietonne.de
> site back in January, but nothing else significant.  

I'm pretty certain there was some kind of web-based tag editor just 
before OAuth was finally set up but I cannot find the mailing list 
references. There wasn't a huge discussion back then - it was clear to 
everyone that what that editor was doing could be a proof of concept at 
most because the account would soon be banned otherwise.

> Nor is there
> anything on the wiki; the OAuth section discusses technical usage, but
> there is no statement about proxy editing, the section of automated
> edits doesn't cover this.  Note also that this is not anonymous
> editing; the identity of the user submitting the change to us is
> tagged with every edit.

One reason why we disallowed anonymous editing is to make sure that 
community members can always be contacted by other community members if 
their edits are worthy of discussion in one way or another. Do you have 
a strategy of how do deal with incoming messages for the "nearmap" user? 
Will you assign staff to forward these messages to the appropriate 
individual?

>> Previous discussions, IIRC, took place in the days before OAuth. Now that we
>> have OAuth on OSM there is even less reason to allow editing without an OSM
>> account.

> I'm not sure I agree.  We don't want to put barriers in the way of an
> average user (and I use that term to explicitly distinguish between
> the average map site user and a mapping enthusiast) making simple
> corrections such as adding address information or naming un-named
> streets.  In particular, we don't want to bounce them to the OSM site
> to register (and face yet another set of terms and conditions), when
> they're already registered on our site.

As I said, without knowing the internal Cloudmade procedures, I am 
pretty sure there will have been a number of people in that organisation 
who'd have said "are you mad, every additional signup button loses us 
50% of people..." but still they do what they do. For a reason, I guess.

> I'm not saying that we have to implement it this way, but up until
> this point we've not been aware of any great community disapproval of
> proxy editing as a principle.  I can absolutely understand that it's
> not something that should be undertaken lightly, but I hope by now
> that many OSMers will appreciate that we continue to do a lot of
> support OSM, and that we do take the integrity and reliability of the
> data very seriously.

I kind of understand your situation but I think the way forward would be 
to either use OpenStreetBugs or set up an OpenStreetBugs like system 
yourself, maybe integrate that in your editor - so that users without an 
OSM account can only place OSB markers, and those (the slightly more 
advanced users) who have an OSM account can then pick these up and fix 
OSM data properly. Maybe you can even do that in a way that lets people 
"start easy" in your application and then progress if they feel more 
comfortable with it.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"