[OSM-talk] A message to our friends at HOT, Peace Corps etc. about Changeset Comments

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Thu Nov 19 00:11:59 UTC 2015


Hi,

   I would like to draw everyone's attention to a long-standing
community recommendation:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_changeset_comments

It explains why you should use sensible changeset comments that describe
what you (think you) have been doing.

I don't know exactly who encourages this, but I am seeing lots of
changesets with comments like this:

#MissingMaps #hotosm-project-12345 Lubumbashi, Congo (DRC) #100mapathons
#OSMGeoWeek

This is *not* useful. First of all, we're not Twitter; we don't evaluate
these hashtags. I don't know if there are some downstream services that
do, but if so, please switch to using a secondary tag (remember,
changesets, like other OSM objects, can have any number of tags).

As a reader of the edit history of a place, I am interested in someone
writing that they have traced buildings or drawn roads or done whatever.
I'm not so much interested in (what I perceive as) vanity hashtags, they
don't help me understand what the person did.

I mean look at this:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/history#map=6/8.418/43.923

It's really a caricature of what changeset comments were meant to be.

Can it be fixed somehow, or have we permanently moved from changeset
comments being aimed at your fellow human mappers to changeset comments
being auto-generated for consumption by some software that makes sense
of them?

Bye
Frederik

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



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