[OSM-talk] New OSM Quick-Fix service
Tobias Zwick
osm at westnordost.de
Sun Oct 15 13:14:24 UTC 2017
Hi Yuri
I am not aware of the record of your previous interactions with the
community and I think you cannot be blamed to not respond to any toxic
feedback and/or accusations thrown at you here, whether they may be
justified or not.
So, I give you the benefit of the doubt and write up this honest and
constructive feedback. Substantively, I come to the same conclusions as
the previous posters: That I find it hard to see that the app will have
any positive impact - at least "as is". I hope you value it nonetheless,
I also have some suggestions at the end.
So, the initial question is: What is the conceptual use case for such a
tool? Where would be its place in the range of available OSM tools?
There is the use case where one tagging scheme has been deprecated by
community consensus and one (combination of) tag(s) should be changed
into another (combination of) tag(s) globally.
1. If this does not require humans because both tagging schemes are
mutually translatable (i.e. lets say for sport=handball <->
sport=team_handball), then, the edit can be made automatically by a bot.
2. If this does require humans to check the transition to the new tag
because the deprecated tagging scheme is ambiguous (i.e. , such as
sport=football -> soccer or american/australian/canadian/... football),
then, an automatic edit cannot be done. Instead, tools like MapRoulette
are used.
3. Finally, if this also does require humans because a tag combination
is suspicious (what would show up as warnings in JOSM and what most of
Osmose consists of), also, a tool like Osmose or MapRoulette is used.
Though, note, for all three cases, a prior consensus is required, either
by prior discussion or by looking at what was previously agreed on in
the wiki. That is the case for *any* organized re-tagging of existing tags.
I reckon you see the quick fix tool to be in category 2 and 3 here,
along with MapRoulette and Osmose, only with the crucial advantage of
being quicker to use, since no editor is required.
But it seems to me, you didn't think this through. If the tool offers
*one* solution to any re-tagging ("Save" or leave it), then, this is
pretty much a manually operated automatic bot (case 1), which really
doesn't make sense. For case 2 and 3, it cannot be used as is, because:
- Quick fix cannot be used to find what kind of football it is (case 2),
but MapRoulette can, because it leaves the actual editing to the user.
- Quick fix cannot be used to solve any markers which may or may not be
an actual problem (case 3) because it has no way of marking any of the
things as false-positives.
Looking at your linked Wiki document (
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quick_fixes ), most of these are
candidates for automatic corrections. I.e.:
- Convert religion=Christian to religion=christian
- Convert various common forms of religion=catholic to
religion=christian + denomination=catholic
- Convert religion=islam to religion=muslim
- etc.
(Only) your initial example ( amenity=sanatorium -> leisure=resort +
resort=sanatorium for ex-USSR-countries) falls in case 2. But then, as
mentioned, either marking as false-positives or other answer options
(i.e. "yes, it is a sanatorium in the West European sense") are missing.
Okay, so much for why I think the tool is, as is, not fit to be used and
probably why you got so many negative responses here.
*However*, the idea as such, to make the clean-up process of either
clearly wrong tags, deprecated tags or even just warnings
semi-automatic, is a very good one. The prerequisite is, that there must
always be the option to *not* apply that fix and save that decision. The
other very critical point is, that the easier you make it for users to
apply a predefined fix, the more precautions must be taken to ensure
that the user really checked the situation.
So, the most critical missing features from my point of view in your
tool are
a) There must be an option to manually edit this instead and/or marking
it as a false positive. In any case, the marker may not be shown for
other users anymore. This was a topic in this thread already and it was
voiced that inventing new tags just to be used by this tool in not
acceptable and I agree with that. The other tools also do not require that.
b) I strongly suggest to offer different answer options. As I said, if
only one option is available, it is really nothing else than a manually
operated automatic edit. If several options are available (i.e.
"american football", "soccer" etc. ) as a quick fix, only then the tool
becomes to be useful. (There are some challenges like that on
MapRoulette also, such as "Phone or fax number is not in international
format" and these in my opinion also do not belong there because they
can be solved automatically)
c) Require users to zoom into the map at around zoom 17 or more to make
any changes. If the users are supposed to check if something is the case
(via satellite image), then at least don't let them cheat by just
solving everything from looking at continents.
d) Finally, I think it does not make sense to have any quick fixes in
that tool that require actually going there (as opposed to looking at
the satellite imagery) because the effort to go there actually (let's
say 20min if you happen to live in the vicinity) is dimensions higher
than clicking on the "Save" button (1 second). The temptation will be
big to simply click on that button without actually checking it. If you
actually go there and check, then, the 1 minute as opposed to 1 second
you need to get the surveyed result into the map through iD/JOSM does
not really matter in comparison.
All in all, in my opinion, the best way to go forward from here is to
take this idea of quick fixes and instead of creating an own tool that
is otherwise very similar to MapRoulette (because it must for being
useful, see above), propose it as a feature to MapRoulette, discuss and
implement it together in accord with the MapRoulette team into their
tool (or Osmose for that matter). It's all open source.
That feature could look like that the creator of a MapRoulette challenge
may optionally provide a range of possible (typical) answer options
("quick fixes") which are then shown as additional buttons right next to
[Edit], [False Positive] and [Skip] for every place within a challenge.
I.e. for football, it could be a dropdown of soccer, american_football etc.
Tobias
On 13/10/2017 23:25, Yuri Astrakhan wrote:
> I would like to introduce a new quick-fix editing service. It allows
> users to generate a list of editing suggestions using a query, review
> each suggestion one by one, and click "Save" on each change if they
> think it's a good edit.
>
> For example, RU community wants to convert amenity=sanatorium ->
> leisure=resort + resort=sanatorium. Clicking on a dot shows a popup
> with the suggested edit. If you think the edit is correct, simply click
> Save.
> Try it: http://tinyurl.com/y8mzvk84
>
> I have started a Quick fixes wiki page, where we can share and discuss
> quick fix ideas.
> * Quick fixes <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quick_fixes>
> * Documentation
> <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Wikidata%2BOSM_SPARQL_query_service#Quick-fix_Editor>
>
> This is a very new project, and bugs are likely. Please go slowly, and
> check the resulting edits. Let me know if you find any problems. Your
> technical expertise is always welcome, see the code
> at https://github.com/nyurik/wikidata-query-gui The service has adapted
> some code from the Osmose project (thanks!)
>
> TODO:
> * Allow multiple edits per one change set
> * Show objects instead of the dots
> * Allow users to change comment before saving
>
>
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>
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