[OSM-talk] Software configuration | Re: iD influencing tagging

[Mark Wagner]

On Thu, 11 Apr 2019 03:17:27 -0400
Yuri Astrakhan <yuriastrakhan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 11, 2019 at 2:10 AM Mateusz Konieczny
> <matkoniecz at tutanota.com> wrote:
> 
> > * easy to edit by community
> >
> > I am dubious whatever "anybody can
> > edit any preset stored as wikidata
> > items" will be considered as benefit
> >  
> 
> One could also doubt that allowing direct OSM and Wikipedia edits by
> anyone would be considered as a benefit... But it does, doesn't it?
> Worst case scenario: someone breaks a preset - with so many eyes on
> them (exposed via wiki pages, used by all editors, monitored via
> numerous tools, cross-checked by validation queries, etc etc etc), it
> will be fixed within minutes.

Wikipedia is a good comparison, but not in the way you intended it.

Wikipedia has special permissions for changing widely-used
templates or the website interface itself: the "template editor" and
"interface administrator" permissions.  An ordinary editor can only
mess up one article at a time, while a template editor can mess up a
half-million articles in a single go, and an interface administrator
can vandalize every page on Wikipedia at once.

If someone breaks the preset for something like "building=yes", then
sure, it'll be spotted and fixed in a matter of minutes.  But in the
meantime, there'll be hundreds of mis-tagged buildings, many of them in
places that nobody will review for years.

-- 
Mark