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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi Ulf,

Ulf Lamping wrote:
> Calling someone selfish when he spends his spare time mapping stuff and 
> adds that to OSM is simply bullshit.

I, too, find your attitude funny. You spend an hour doing edits, then 
cannot be bothered to spend a minute to think of a good changeset 
comment. Instead, you say, it is the job of all the others who want to 
make sense of your edit to investigate, and spend certianly more than 
that one minute.

That is indeed selfish, because you're saying that your time is more 
valuable than theirs.

I'd appreciate very much if, in the future, you would contribute 1% less 
data and use the saved time to double the value of your contribution by 
telling your fellow mappers what you did in a changeset comment.

And as I said to John, blaming insufficient tools is a cheap excuse. 
This is about paying respect to your fellow mappers, about being part of 
a community rather than just someone who dumps data onto a heap ("let 
the others make sense of this"). That is most certainly a selfish 
attitude. Just because you upload a change to OSM doesn't mean you're 
automatically not selfish. There are indeed people who spend their spare 
time mapping stuff and add it to OSM and half the community goes "oh my 
god, can't that guy contribute to another project, he's stubborn, 
doesn't communicate about his edits, and does things all of us think 
wrong". You know we have several such cases in Germany on the regional 
and national level. You don't want to put yourself on a level with them, 
do you?

Bye
Frederik

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