[OSM-talk] Revert requests in general

John Smith deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com
Wed Aug 4 23:20:07 BST 2010


On 5 August 2010 08:02, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think the point that Frederik was trying to make was that this model
> ("bulk imported in real time") is not ideal. Ideally, we want the users
> interacting directly with the OSM API rather than going through some
> intermediary service.

It's obvious that Nearmap, and others, want something simpler than
potlatch to allow people to add their home address or even just a
missing street name as a one off, sure this might get abused and it
will be up to Nearmap or others running these services to deal with
abuse or face the problem of having their account blocked until they
can. Making this process unnecessarily complicated is exactly the
reason why Nearmap is attempting this in the first place.

> We want this for at least two reasons:
> 1) So we can follow our standard procedure for blocking users that perform
> unwanted edits (whether they be vandals, inappropriate imports, or unusable
> sources).

As above, this will be up to Nearmap to police, and to some extent
this should shift some burden from the OSM community onto others, with
paid staff, to monitor so others can get on and do the mapping, I see
this as a good thing!

> 2) So we can communicate with the end mapper (regarding license changes,
> community events, etc.).

These users don't give a toss about licenses, they just want to fix a
mistake, such as a missing street name, why make things more
complicated than that?

> OAuth was implemented for exactly this purpose. The user creates an account
> on OSM.org, NearMap's client authenticates with OAuth, and the user can make
> edits. It sounds like NearMap has an issue with sending the user off to
> OSM.org to generate a user account and trying to draw them back in to
> complete the OAuth process.

It might have been, but that's authentication, not account creation,
which is the whole point Ben made in the first place, they don't want
to subject their users to multiple sets of terms and conditions and
confirming account creation and so on and so forth just to add a
street name, no wonder OSM is only for the geeks when the process has
to be so convoluted and overly engineered just to fix a simple mistake
like a missing street name.




More information about the talk mailing list