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

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Fri Jul 30 12:18:03 BST 2010


Dear all,

    we've had the changeset feature for quite a while now and I believe 
it is very helpful in a number of ways.

I can select an area and see the edit history for it (soon, hopefully, 
even ignoring those world-spanning changesets). I can click on a 
username and see what that user was up to in the last month (or at least 
what they thought they were up to). It is so much easier to read a short 
phrase about an edit than having to look at the area and history of 
affected objects.

There are two groups of people however who refuse to put in proper 
changeset comments, and instead write "...", "some mapping", "fixed 
stuff", or even "none of your business".

One group consists of vandals and morons who never wanted to be part of 
the community in the first place; who consider any srutiny about their 
edits an invasion of their right to map crap at best, or want to hide 
what they're doing at worst. They write "..." as a shorthand for "kiss 
my ass community". It is useless to try and talk reason into these 
people so I won't even try.

The other group consists of well-meaning mappers who are valuable 
members of our community but who perceive the need to enter a changeset 
comment as a kind of nagging, nannying, and who might be tempted to 
enter a useless comment as a form of protest against that. I'm sure 
everyone who has to work with version control systems of any sort knows 
the feeling - change one line of code and then have to write two lines 
of commit comment!

To them, I say: Yes, you're right, it can be a pain sometimes, but if 
you practice it for a while, it will be an easy routine. If writing 
English takes you too long, use your national language, that's no 
problem. And you don't have to write long sentences, a few words are 
sufficient. But that little bit of time you spend when committing your 
changes adds so much value! OpenStreetMap is not about the data, it is 
about the community, and the community is exactly who benefits from your 
changeset comment - someone checking edits in an area, maybe even 
preparing something for the press to demonstrate how many people are 
working in an area (and how diverse their work is), someone wanting to 
get a quick idea of what another community member's area of expertise 
is... all that becomes easy with proper changeset comments. Changeset 
comments can even be messages to other community members - they see what 
you're doing and they might start to help out or do the same in their area.

Don't be fooled; the small changeset comment that you enter when 
uploading stuff *will* be read by many people. Done well, changeset 
comments are tremendously helpful.

Please use them!

Bye
Frederik





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