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

[Kate Chapman]

Hi Frederik,

I fail to see how machine readable hashtags are "not useful". They allow
statistical analysis which can be used to inform future recruitment and
other activities. Often we make assumptions about OSM contributors not
backed by statistics this allows improvement in one corner of the OSM
community. Perhaps some human readable text would also be useful, but I
don't think of adding hashtag like comments as an issue.

-Kate

On Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 4:11 PM, 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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