[OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Christoph Hormann]

On Monday 25 February 2019, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> But: If you engage in the collaborative writing of a document with
> others, and one of them decides to replace all occurrences of "Open
> Source Software" with "Free and Open Source Software" (for example),
> by using a search-and-replace mechanism in the chosen editing
> platform, would you also object to that?

I would not think very highly of someone who makes such a change on the 
OSM wiki (in a "don't you have anything better to do" kind of way) and 
if someone does this sequentially on a large number of pages i would 
probably ask them to stop.

> And then further, assuming your answer is "well that's ok if the edit
> makes sense", what if Mediawiki had a global search-and-replace
> function, where you click on a button, and fill in a form. Would this
> also make you disengage from the platform altogehter?

For the purpose of collaborative documentation and communication in OSM 
and without any possibility to opt out of the global search-and-replace 
for contributors: Yes.

> From there, it's only a small step to "bot edits", they're basically
> nothing else than a global search-and-replace, it's just the way the
> Mediawiki software is built that people use the "bot API" for things
> like this.

I know.  Mediawiki is not primarily written for use as the basis of the 
OSM wiki so obviously not every function it offers makes sense in that 
context.

> You mention a potential "two class system" but frankly, does this not
> already exist, with one class being those who understand and use
> templates to the full extent of their capabilities, and the other
> class not daring to touch them? [...]

I see templates rather critically because they can - as you said - be 
used for very similar things as bot, by editing a template you can 
mechanically modify all the pages that make use of the template.  And 
widely used templates (in particular for example 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Template:ValueDescription) have 
been used in this fashion in the past.

Where templates have a useful purpose on the OSM wiki are IMO three 
things

* providing some standardized formatting for things (like tag and key 
templates)
* providing a mechanism and some verification to record structured data 
on the wiki which is otherwise without a firm structure.
* integrating external sources of information in the wiki (like taginfo 
stuff).

The important thing is to keep these clearly separated, limit use of 
templates to these things and not allow sneaking in of mechanisms of 
algorithmic control of human contributions into it.

But the fundamental difference is that templates can only be used to 
manipulate content within a template.  So i can when contributing to 
the wiki opt out of templates by deliberately contributing outside of 
templates only.

> I think it would benefit the wiki if we stopped allowing everyone to
> pursue their personal hobby horses - wit recent motorcycle stuff, or
> wikidata features added, or a lot of verdy_p's work - and request
> that more discussion happens before edits are made.

Yes, in a lot of ways the wiki is currently not serving its purpose very 
well because it is often used to pursue personal interests on their own 
and not for what it is primarily meant for, namely for documenting and 
communicating about mapping in OSM.

But i don't think that bots could in any way help with this problem, on 
the contrary, they create additional means with extended power for 
people to pursue their personal interests and would likely aggrevate 
the problem rather than solving it.


-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/