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

[Frederik Ramm]

Ed,

Hillsman, Edward wrote:
> I used to think this way, but for the past couple of months I've been
> mapping to support three separate goals: a research project that
> involves importing bus stops, inventorying shops and points of
> interest for an area bicycle map, and preparing for a walk-trip
> planner like the University of Maryland's. Each focuses on different
> features in a common part of town. If I reference bus stops in the
> changeset comment, the student who is doing the programming on the
> bus stop project can pull up all of my changesets and immediately
> identify which ones he needs to look at. He's told me how useful this
> is. If I reference inventorying shops on a street with street name,
> the students in the bike club can do the same for that.

Thanks for that "changeset comment success story" ;)

> But, I haven't yet adopted the discipline of doing just one
> activity's worth of mapping in a changeset. When I inventoried the
> shops on one street, I also mapped the proper location of the bus
> stops, and edited both in one changeset (actually a series of
> changesets because I didn't get it all done in one session). And from
> Steve's comments, I'm not alone in doing things this way. It is just
> easier for me to record everything I see in the series of photographs
> I take of, say, a strip mall and its setting, than to do just shops
> in one changeset, close it, open another, do the bus stops, move to
> the photos for the next strip mall, and repeat. 

Of course. I think it would be going too far to actually expect mappers 
to close an editing session (often losing some context) and then reopen 
it just to make another kind of edit. We don't want to reach a point 
where newbies e-mail SteveC complaining that they got turned away from 
OSM because the community demanded too much of them ;)

Changeset comments don't have to be perfect. If everyone aimed at not 
writing silly ones, that would be already be a big step forward, and 
yours seem to be safely in the "useful" zone.

Maybe in the long run, power editors like JOSM will allow you to keep 
mutliple changesets open at the same time, switching between them by the 
click of a button, or even allowing you so easily sort and filter edits 
(all those with bus stations, in changeset 1, all others, in changeset 
2). But that's something for the (rather more distant I assume) future.

I think it helps if one keeps in mind what Peter said: "I always read 
what my co-mappers are writing." - your changeset comment is a message 
to other humans who work with you on this, whether you know them or not. 
Trying to send them a meaningful message, and thus treating them with 
respect, is what counts.

Bye
Frederik