Dear all,
we've had the changeset feature for quite a while now and I believe
it is very helpful in a number of ways.
I can select an area and see the edit history for it (soon, hopefully,
even ignoring those world-spanning changesets). I can click on a
username and see what that user was up to in the last month (or at least
what they thought they were up to). It is so much easier to read a short
phrase about an edit than having to look at the area and history of
affected objects.
There are two groups of people however who refuse to put in proper
changeset comments, and instead write "...", "some mapping", "fixed
stuff", or even "none of your business".
One group consists of vandals and morons who never wanted to be part of
the community in the first place; who consider any srutiny about their
edits an invasion of their right to map crap at best, or want to hide
what they're doing at worst. They write "..." as a shorthand for "kiss
my ass community". It is useless to try and talk reason into these
people so I won't even try.
The other group consists of well-meaning mappers who are valuable
members of our community but who perceive the need to enter a changeset
comment as a kind of nagging, nannying, and who might be tempted to
enter a useless comment as a form of protest against that. I'm sure
everyone who has to work with version control systems of any sort knows
the feeling - change one line of code and then have to write two lines
of commit comment!
To them, I say: Yes, you're right, it can be a pain sometimes, but if
you practice it for a while, it will be an easy routine. If writing
English takes you too long, use your national language, that's no
problem. And you don't have to write long sentences, a few words are
sufficient. But that little bit of time you spend when committing your
changes adds so much value! OpenStreetMap is not about the data, it is
about the community, and the community is exactly who benefits from your
changeset comment - someone checking edits in an area, maybe even
preparing something for the press to demonstrate how many people are
working in an area (and how diverse their work is), someone wanting to
get a quick idea of what another community member's area of expertise
is... all that becomes easy with proper changeset comments. Changeset
comments can even be messages to other community members - they see what
you're doing and they might start to help out or do the same in their area.
Don't be fooled; the small changeset comment that you enter when
uploading stuff *will* be read by many people. Done well, changeset
comments are tremendously helpful.
Please use them!
Bye
Frederik
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