[OSM-talk] Potlatch deprecation

Fernando Trebien fernando.trebien at gmail.com
Sat Feb 22 01:10:11 UTC 2014


It is not that easy to damage relations in JOSM. Sure, you can, but
you get blocking warnings: once, when you change the relation
indirectly (perhaps breaking it), and another (issued by JOSM's very
comprehensive validator) by the time you attempt to upload your
changes. Both warnings stop your work (always! there's no way to turn
them off), make you read, ask you to decide how to handle the
situation, and are quite informative: they tell you where you acted
and what was the result. It sure is a bit low level, but that is good
teaching. If you do not understand what you read, you can then go
search for help. But if you get no warning (as in Potlatch), you don't
even know you need to seek learning about relations. It is very hard
to argue that someone can "miss" both warnings "accidentally".

Can the user damage the relations with JOSM? Sure. But the user has
been warned twice and should know what he/she is doing. They may
ignore the warnings if they do not know what they mean, but then you
have a better point to later approach the user and tell him/her to be
more careful and read more about relations. If you do that to Potlatch
users, it is totally fair if they reply: "How could I have known?" You
can't expect them to re-read all that is written everywhere on the UI
at every change they perform on the map. Potlatch should call their
attention to important things (such as unintentional data loss).

Even experienced users may accidentally destroy relations in Potlatch
because of a short moment of inattention. In JOSM, you're always
reminded.

On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 9:08 PM, Bryce Nesbitt <bryce2 at obviously.com> wrote:
> I think all three major editors make it too easy to damage relations.
>
> And that starting to damage a relation (by a user) is a perfect teaching
> opportunity.
> The moment someone deletes part of a boundary relation,
> is the perfect teaching moment about boundary relations.
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>



-- 
Fernando Trebien
+55 (51) 9962-5409

"The speed of computer chips doubles every 18 months." (Moore's law)
"The speed of software halves every 18 months." (Gates' law)



More information about the talk mailing list