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

john whelan jwhelan0112 at gmail.com
Thu Nov 19 00:52:40 UTC 2015


HOT and OSM are slightly different, HOT maps on OSM but uses a simpler more
standardized approach.  Many of their volunteers often do not know enough
English to write a meaningful change set comment.

HOT tends to map in areas that do not have a great deal of OSM mapping
already in place so I don't see that it really matters if they use preset
comments from the tile system.  The HOT comment gives you the task and tile
number so you can look up on the tile system where it is and also what has
been asked for.

Or are we now asking that all mappers on OSM have to be able to read and
write in English since that is the normal language for communication in OSM
or is one of the local African languages sufficient.  If it is then I
assure you I won't be able to understand what it says.

I think one thing I like about HOT is the validation process, an
experienced mapper goes over the mapping and tries to eliminate as many
errors or mis-tags as possible and ensure that everything visible in the
image is mapped, and yes I understand armchair mappers are looked down on
by many mappers but the work they do is valuable in many areas.

Cheerio John

On 18 November 2015 at 19:11, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> 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
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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