[OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Andy Townsend]

On 25/02/2019 09:37, Christoph Hormann wrote:
> ... There are several ethical concerns that motivate me here - the one 
> that
> is easiest to understand is probably that allowing bots would create a
> two class system within the OSM community on the wiki - those who are
> able to develop and run bots would form a ruling class while the rest
> would be subject to this rule whether they agree with it or not.  And
> for this to happen bots would not need to be used on a regular basis,
> the mere possibility of this creates the hierarchy between those who
> can and those who cannot.

As an aside from the discussion about bots, we already have a 
distinction between "those are are familiar with wikimedia concepts, and 
think that all users should be too" and "those who just want to document 
stuff".  Unfortunately some of those in the former category had to be 
stopped from editing because they were effectively stopping anyone in 
the latter category from doing anything at all, and unfortunately some 
of the effects are still there.  I remember that I gave up on 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Derbyshire&action=history 
back in 2017 when one particular wiki elf insisted I was "doing it wrong".

However a number of areas have been much improved since their departure 
- https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Beginners%27_guide doesn't suffer 
from "categoryitis" that it used to before, for example.  Another 
example of a much improved area is 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Android - there's still a link to 
the category but an explanation saying what it is!

There are still some example of "don't edit this" pages - 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Template:Place is one such (but as 
it's a template that's understandable).

Part of the problem we had with "problem users" above was that they 
effectively acted like bots; they didn't think about how other people 
worked with the data (both creators and consumers). This could be a 
problem with bot edits too, but only if the bot creator doesn't think 
about other people.  The tricky bit with wiki edits is summarising the 
status quo while also reflecting the various conflicting points of view 
- any bot that is used to "force" it's authors view on others would be a 
problem.

Best Regards,

Andy