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

[Tobias Knerr]

john whelan wrote:
> Currently I'm cleaning up in Ottawa, I have over 8,000 errors to clean
> up left and recently I've probably cleaned at least a couple of
> thousand errors so far.  Things like incorrect street names, where I
> have a CANVEC source that helps enormously, connecting streets up so
> you can run routing software. etc.
> 
> Are you seriously suggesting for each correction I do a write up
> saying why I or Validator think its wrong and my source for the
> correction?

Usually, corrections can be grouped - for example, by fixing all the
incorrectly joined junctions in an area first, then uploading with an
appropriate changeset comment.

That's a lot of errors, by the way. Have those errors been created by
humans or by some import? Everything I modify was manually created by a
human being, so it's a reasonable assumption that someone will be
interested in my reasons for changing their work. They might even learn
something from it and don't repeat the same mistakes in the future, thus
I might actually be saving time that I would otherwise have spent on
fixing those future errors.

The situation could be somewhat different when fixing import errors,
which is something I'm not familiar with.

Tobias Knerr