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

[Warin]

On 19/11/2015 11:11 AM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> 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
>

My changeset comments usually:

Start with the 'where' - country state and city/town ... if I range over 
some continents then I leave this out!

'What I did.' This could be 'housekeeping' - where I 'fix' validation 
errors and warnings. I now try to keep the 'housekeeping' as a separate 
chengeset from other things. General things like 'added sports details', 
'added road names' etc.

These things can be of use to me - keeping track of where I have been 
and what I did in general. Sometimes I miss all the things I did ... but 
I get most of them. Sometimes I miss changing the changeset comments!

-------------------
I think the addition of the 'where' is usefull. So I 'like' that bit of 
the HOT changeset comment. But I too would like the human operator to 
add some detail.