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

[John Smith]

On 31 July 2010 23:25, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> No. Equally valuable. But they are more. Only one person makes the edits,
> but more than one person look at the edits.

Sure, if on average more than one person views the changeset
information, is this really happening though?

> All wanted was to say: Please folks, add meaningful changeset comments. I
> think it is plain obvious that they are very useful, not only to me
> personally. Of about 20 people participating in this thread, only three seem
> to be of the opinion that changeset comments are a waste of time. Yes,
> people have their opinions and yes, some might be of that opinion, but
> luckily it is a small minority.

And how many don't set meaningful tags and didn't contribute to this thread?

> I think there is a wide range of useful changeset comments; you're
> misrepresenting my statement if you say I was complaining about people not
> commenting "excactly how I think they should". I'm just asking for
> meaningful changeset comments.

So far no one has given a reasonable example for changesets with
diverse activities, so please be more specific.

> No. Liz, helpfully, pointed out that the Wiki did not reflect what the
> community expects, as has been proven by this thread. I merely amended the
> Wiki to reflect that. If you carefully read the version history you will see
> that even before I made the change, the Wiki definitely said that the
> comment was used in many places; it just wasn't quite so obvious that people
> actually use it a lot.

Back to lies, damn lies and statistics, 20 v 3 out of 5-10k active
editors, it's not a very good sample size to be extrapolating from, if
anything it shows a minority have a strong opinion one way or the
other, and the rest just don't care.

> I'm not even starting to discuss Key:UUID here.

Who said anything about that, I was talking about your spurious
comment on the emergency=* thread...