[OSM-talk] Fixme: A proposal

[John Sturdy]

On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 7:48 AM, Jochen Topf <jochen at remote.org> wrote:

> Only manually detected problems should be tagged with fixme. And it should be
> as easy as possible to mark those. Extra categorization would make it more
> difficult.

I don't think it makes it significantly more difficult, as fixmes
should have some kind of description of the problem.  Classifiying
them in the tags is just a more systematic way of doing that, which
makes them more amenable to higher-level tool use (e.g. someone could
write a program that identifies the areas with most density of
problems that need on-the-ground surveying... or even a route planner
that creates a route using highways tagged as approximate, for someone
to carry a GPS over, although the latter is probably stretching it a
bit).

> Why exactly do you want the extra categorization? What help would it
> be in your practical day to day work?

It's not just ease of tagging things with fixme that counts (although
it should be easy, and a plain "fixme" should always be acceptable);
ease of using (finding and fixing) the fixmes is also important.

> I can see one useful differentiation: Some problems are fixable only with local
> knowledge (say a missing street name), some are fixable from afar (most
> topological problems). It might be helpful to not see problems needing local
> knowledge in areas where I don't have local knowledge.

I think it's also helpful for people to be able to plan problem-fixing
surveys efficiently.

__John