[OSM-talk] QA bots commenting on changesets - your thoughts?

[_ dikkeknodel]

Hi Michał,

I can see value in making sure that mistakes are not accidentally introduced. However, I am not sure whether a bot like you describe is a wanted solution.

  *   I have concerns about false positives, when the bot considers an action as braking a connection and gives comment while the change is actually valid. This relates to what Martin brings in, false positives raise the noise level and the comments will therefore be ignored in the future. I don’t know what an acceptable level for false positives is, but there must be literature on it from psychology/computer sciences.
  *   Feedback by a bot as comment to a changeset is too late for maintaining data integrity, the mistake is already submitted to the database. The feedback should be given when trying to submit a changeset. I can imagine an implementation similar to what JOSM does for validation before submitting a dataset. This validation should then occur on the OSM server instead, or access to the changeset API should only be allowed for applications that have decent validation implemented. The second option is maybe preferable from a money perspective, since the calculations will be done locally and no server capacity is required. It will however put more requirements on hardware and software used to input data.

Cheers, dikkeknodel

Van: Martin Koppenhoefer<mailto:dieterdreist at gmail.com>
Verzonden: woensdag 4 april 2018 11:17
Aan: Michał Brzozowski<mailto:www.haxor at gmail.com>
CC: osm<mailto:talk at openstreetmap.org>
Onderwerp: Re: [OSM-talk] QA bots commenting on changesets - your thoughts?



2018-04-04 10:44 GMT+02:00 Michał Brzozowski <www.haxor at gmail.com<mailto:www.haxor at gmail.com>>:
There's a bot in Poland that comments on changesets which break addresses (e.g. combining addr:place with addr:street), along with an explanation and links to forum topic.
What do you think about it? Are such bots useful or not?

while the example situation merits some kind of response, I am not sure if automated changeset comments are a good answer, because this will raise the noise level and very soon we will not find the needles in the comments haystack any more. Maybe the time has come for tags in changeset comments (bot=yes) ;-)
Cheers,
Martin

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