[OSM-talk] A thought on bot edits

[Christoph Hormann]

With all the recent endeavors to push more automated edits in OSM and 
with the related rules and policies clearly failing (just look at 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Automated_edits_log and 
compare that to what is actually taking place in terms of automated 
edits these days) i just had the idea that it might be a lot easier and 
better if we replace all current regulations of automated edits with a 
simple rule:

Automated edits of any kind may freely add or edit tags with keys 
starting with 'bot:' but may not under any circumstances touch any 
other tags.

This way people could go crazy bot editing whatever they want in that 
namespace but would not interfere with manual mapping activity and data 
consumers could choose freely if the want bot edited information and if 
they do if they want to give it priority over manually verified data.  
And mappers could configure their editors to hide the bot tags if they 
are not interested in them.

Of course considering the big volume of editing activity that would 
likely take place in the 'bot:' namespace in that scenario it might be 
a good idea to put those tags into a separate database for efficiency 
reasons.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/