[OSM-talk] A personal plea to bot authors

SomeoneElse lists at mail.atownsend.org.uk
Sun Apr 1 13:24:35 BST 2012


There are a number of automated changes that get made to the OSM 
database (bots).  Some are straightforward (correcting common 
misspellings), some less so (changing one form of tagging to another, 
removing incorrect data*, removing single-node ways).

Would it be possible to suspend automated changes until a little time 
after the activities defined here 
<http://blog.osmfoundation.org/2012/03/27/service-schedule-march-april-2012/> 
are fully complete?

When the rebuild has completed (i.e. immediately after "to be 
determined" on the linked page), there will be data in a number of areas 
that will require human intervention (e.g. a way with nodes from a 
decliner in it removed, or a node with tags contributed by a decliner 
removed).  What remains may well normally trigger an automated change 
via a bot.  In the post-licence-change situation, however, it surely 
makes sense to give human mappers a chance to assess the situation 
without having to plough into pre-bot history, at a time when the OSM 
servers are likely to be busier than ever.

So please, no bots until the date announced on 9th April?

Cheers,
Andy

* This may at first glance seem OK, but I came across a problem with 
exactly this recently.  A newbie editor had merged two ways with 
different layers to create a way with layer "1; 0".  The bot changed 
this to "1" when the correct action would have been to investigate which 
ways the newbie editor merged and ensure that the correct layer was 
applied to the correct parts of the new way.

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