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

[Eugene Alvin Villar]

+100!

I very much agree with the emphasis on the community aspect of a nice
(doesn't have to be great) changeset comment.

Code versioning systems support revision comments and good comments help
people who maintain the software understand ones contributions.

Even Wikipedia highly values edit summaries (and people have opposed
adminship of editors because of misleading, uncivil, or useless edit
summaries): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Edit_summary


On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 7:18 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>



-- 
http://vaes9.codedgraphic.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20100731/65b5ae95/attachment.html>