[OSM-talk] New OSM Quick-Fix service

[Richard Fairhurst]

Yuri Astrakhan wrote:
> 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.

I've been a bit loth to get involved with this one but I do share the
general worry.

Editor authors have a general responsibility to encourage good editing
behaviour in their UI design. It isn't quite as simple as "every tool can be
used for good and bad things": the developer should design the tool to
encourage the good and discourage (or prevent) the bad. The developers of
JOSM and, particularly, iD have long been exemplary in this regard.

This new tool can certainly be used for good, and there are use cases for
which it is ideal, but it's also very easy to misuse. My biggest concern is
that since it's decoupled from an editing environment, the natural tendency
is just to click 'Change', 'Change', 'Change' rather than reviewing and
manually making the changes. (We've seen this behaviour in several
"challenges" in the past, such as the dupe nodes drive.) OSM is a collection
of human knowledge; this workflow goes too far in removing the human from
the equation.

As an alternative, could I encourage you to look at something tentative I
did the other year for that relic of an editor, Potlatch 2?

   https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Richard/diary/28267

This allows a user to navigate instantly between instances of a "challenge"
within the editor, while benefiting from an external data source to define
that challenge. The P2 implementation is fairly simple (there's no
"Resolved" button to feed back to that external source, for example) but
demonstrates the concept.

If you were to build something along these lines into JOSM or iD, following
the traditional MapRoulette-like approach of asking users to make the change
rather than automating it, I think you'd get the benefits you're seeking to
achieve without the potential damage.

Richard



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