[OSM-talk] Commenting and thumbs up/down feature for changesets

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 07/25/11 09:27, Steve Bennett wrote:
> Two thinks that Wikipedia has that OSM lacks, are good visibility of
> recent changes (just click "view history"), and localised forums (talk
> page). Although it's possible (if difficult) to get the history of a
> given object in OSM, I don't know of any easy way to get a sense of
> the recent history of an area. Undoubtedly there are third party
> websites, but anything built into openstreetmap.org?

There's OWL which in the medium term is scheduled to replace/augment the 
current history view. That should give a good idea of the recent 
development in an area.

And yes, it would be great to have something like localised messaging. I 
absolutely hate Wikipedia talk pages, to me they are the most useless 
form of exchange. But it would be great if it were possible to post 
notes onto OSM with a certain geographic extent, e.g. "caution, Bing 
imagery for this area is 10 years old and many things have been torn 
down since", or "mapping party in this area next weekend", or "import of 
data planned for this area, see <...> for discussion" and so on.

This is however orthogonal to the changeset-based messaging that I have 
suggested. If I want to say something about a specific changeset, it 
should be possible to attach my comment to that changeset instead of 
having to make a general localised note for the area in question, saying 
"I don't think changeset #12345 was a good idea...".

> Personally, I would have trouble marking many changesets "-1" without
> doing extensive research. But there are a few where I've queried the
> author, and in some cases found explanations that weren't obvious at
> first

I think it all depends on what you think a "-1" means.

If I find a changeset fishy, then conduct extensive research and find my 
suspicion confirmed, I will revert it (and not attach a mere -1 to it). 
Problem is that there are many things that I see and I find fishy where 
I don't have the resources or the patience for extensive research. 
Currently, in these cases I do exactly nothing, which means that the 
information "1 person found this fishy" is lost. That information in 
itself does not have a value. But if there was a sufficient number of 
other people who were of the same opinion then maybe someone 
should/would investigate.

(Actually I sometimes to this on IRC: "Does anyone else find this 
strange?"; then if a few others say "yep" I might actually investigate.)

Bye
Frederik