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

[Mateusz Konieczny]

On Wed, 18 Nov 2015 19:52:40 -0500
john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

In that case somebody is editing OSM. Doing it for HOT related-purposes
does not mean that it has special rights.

In that case "HOT and OSM are slightly different" is meaningless and
not relevant - it is OSM.

> 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.

Again - it is edit in OSM. Imports, remote mapping, including remote
mapping for HOT purposes have no special rights. If anything armchair
and automated mapping must be more careful.

Claiming that empty/useless changeset comments are OK is absurd and
arrogant.

> 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.

In that case complaint was clearly about content - or to be more
precise lack of it. Using local language is perfectly OK.

> 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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> >