On Fri, 30 Jul 2010 21:52:47 +1000 Steve Bennett <stevag...@gmail.com> wrote: >I also question this "value" you talk about. I don't think I've ever >looked at another member's changeset. If the user interfaces made that >a more common occurrence, I'd probably put more effort into changeset >comments, but for me they're not very visible. > > (Corollary: when another user tells me specifically that they would >find my changesets easier to navigate if I commented them properly, I >would re-evaluate. But afaik, no one ever looks at my work, so it >seems a bit pointless.)
I used to think this way, but for the past couple of months I've been mapping to support three separate goals: a research project that involves importing bus stops, inventorying shops and points of interest for an area bicycle map, and preparing for a walk-trip planner like the University of Maryland's. Each focuses on different features in a common part of town. If I reference bus stops in the changeset comment, the student who is doing the programming on the bus stop project can pull up all of my changesets and immediately identify which ones he needs to look at. He's told me how useful this is. If I reference inventorying shops on a street with street name, the students in the bike club can do the same for that. But, I haven't yet adopted the discipline of doing just one activity's worth of mapping in a changeset. When I inventoried the shops on one street, I also mapped the proper location of the bus stops, and edited both in one changeset (actually a series of changesets because I didn't get it all done in one session). And from Steve's comments, I'm not alone in doing things this way. It is just easier for me to record everything I see in the series of photographs I take of, say, a strip mall and its setting, than to do just shops in one changeset, close it, open another, do the bus stops, move to the photos for the next strip mall, and repeat. And, sometimes I enter something and it triggers a memory of something that I observed elsewhere the day before, and I "flit" to the other location to note it before I forget it again, and then come back to what I was doing. But, I think that labeling at least part of the changeset correctly helps. So thanks, Frederik, for raising this. Ed Edward L. Hillsman, Ph.D. Senior Research Associate Center for Urban Transportation Research University of South Florida 4202 Fowler Ave., CUT100 Tampa, FL 33620-5375 813-974-2977 (tel) 813-974-5168 (fax) hills...@cutr.usf.edu http://www.cutr.usf.edu _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
