[OSM-talk] weeklyOSM #379 2017-10-17-2017-10-23

[ajt1047 at gmail.com]

On 28/10/2017 14:53, Blake Girardot wrote:
> ...
>
> Please read his personal page on the wiki to understand his overall
> goal and why to achieve it he has made a lot (like thousands) of
> edits: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Verdy_p

I've read many, many screeds written by him over the last couple of 
years, but they all come across as "never mind the quality, feel the 
width".  The text that Marcos Oliveira quoted further down the thread is 
pretty typical; you could easily refute all of points raised one by one 
("I've fixed them as soon as they were discovered", "I've been very 
tolerant", "But seriously, if I ever made some temporary real mistake, 
did I ever refuse to correct it? " etc.), but it'd be a waste of time; 
communication simply would not occur - what he's written is just 
self-deluding garbage.  There are many, many times when he's been told 
that his understanding of a particular issue doesn't match people who 
are familiar with it in the real world; but he seems to lack the skills 
to process that information.

> ...
>
> I understand we can all be difficult to work with at times, and
> sometimes some of us are hard to work with all the times.
>
> Verdy, I urge you to slow down on the wiki editing,

That approach has been tried a number of times (including as I 
understand it temporary bans from editing the wiki in the past).  It 
didn't work; that ship's sailed.  The only thing that will work now is a 
permanent ban.

> ...
>
> And I urge us to keep trying to find a way to understand verdy's wiki
> work and work with Verdy on the wiki. He seems to be making real,
> important, needed improvements that will make the wiki much better in
> the long term.

I see no evidence of this.  The only edits I see (such as introducing 
unnecessary layers of categories) are harmful to the documentation of 
the OSM project as a whole.

> My impression is that much of verdy's improvements are just difficult
> to understand for non wikimedia experts, difficult to explain because
> they are complicated.

If that's the case, then he's doing it wrong.  Let's take a simple 
example - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Derbyshire is supposed to 
be useful to local mappers and it should be easy to navigate to 
neighbouring counties.  Unfortunately it isn't due to the categorisation 
of English counties and the complete dogs breakfast that is 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Counties_in_England&action=history 
(primary editor Verdy p <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Verdy_p>).

> ...
>
> Verdy, I really wish it was easier to understand what you were doing
> and it was easier to explain,

Clearly, if it isn't possible to understand what he's doing, then he's 
not doing a good job, surely?  Currently he's at 69 "contributions" so 
far today, and they all seem entirely unrelated to documenting OSM as a 
project.

I offered to intervene in the dispute involving the WeeklyOSM calendar; 
but someone else had already been given the "mediator" job of trying to 
sort things out.  I wish them all the best, but if it doesn't work out 
then I think a permanent ban is the only option.

Let's not forget what the wiki is for - it's supposed to document OSM; 
to serve mappers.  If it fails to do that - e.g. if people like Blake 
fail to understand why edits are made - then it's failed.

Best Regards,

Andy



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