[OSM-talk] Editing help.openstreetmap.org / Question from Gnonthgol

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 02/27/12 09:45, Erik Johansson wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 12:02, Frederik Ramm<frederik at remote.org>  wrote:
>>> I [..] remove comments[..] if someone writes: "Why does<x>
>>> happen? I think that those who allow this to happen are really
>>> stupid!"
> ....
>>> This medium is less
>>> helpful if the reader has to browse 25 answers to get the whole
>>> picture!
>
> I'm hoping you really are only referring to opinions like "this
> project suxxors!!!!", and questions with 10 answers with variants of
> saying that I should use Maperitive to render stuff. Because those
> obviously can be deleted.

Yes, but also I think that it would be good to treat this less like a 
forum where everyone says something, and more like a wiki where everyone 
contributes to one good article.

For example, if someone asks a question and someone else answers "there 
are two ways to do this, a) ..., or b) ...", and then someone adds 
another answer that shows a third useful solution. Now you have a 
contradiction; the first answer is obviously not (fully) correct because 
there are not (only) two solutions but three; and ideally, the first 
answer should simply be amended to read "there are three ways to do 
this", and include the new answer as option c).

The reason why I don't normally do this is that whenever you upvote an 
answer, the original author of the answer gets "karma points", and if I 
were to e.g. merge your answer into mine in the manner described above, 
then *I* would get all the credit for it and that would be unfair. 
Still, a reader would usually profit from one coherent answer, instead 
of 10 individual "you could also ..." answers.

(The whole platform is built according to that ideal - the concept that 
you can "accept" one, but only one, answer is a sign of that.)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"