Hello, could a WikiMedia-style or MusicBrainz-style submission system for nodes and ways be implemented for OSM?
I, like many other edits, care about all the information I have entered in OSM (not much right now, I'm new here). I especially care about random people changing or reverting things that have been hardly researched and edited. Other open databases suffer the same problem: the example I am more familiar with are Wikipedia and MusicBrainz. Both Wikipedia (WikiMedia I should say) and MusicBrainz allows users to subscribe to certain pages (WikiMedia) or Artits (MusicBrainz). When a change occurs they are notified via mail or feeds. Those messages usually include a link to the diff so the user can see whether the changes are acceptable or not. The subscription system used by WikiMedia and MusicBrainz saves a lot of time to editors, especially when compared to other methods or, in general, to methods that does not point out what exactly has changed and how. OpenStreetMaps has two different mechanism, both with some issues. First, the watch:user=1 tag. The feeds produced by the Xapi using the watch tag would be interesting but they don't seem to work (at least in the past hours) and they expose very little information. Moreover, all those tags pollute the database. Second, OSMMapper. OSMMapper is an interesting project but it is less structured than one would hope. It is based on areas so it is impossible for a user to follow just a street or certain nodes (f.e. attractions) in a crowded area. The number of commits would be just too high. Also, it is graphical-only tool and this reduces the ability to integrate it in other projects: f.e. JOSM could not use that information to zoom to changed ways. More, it is a separate project and I think this watch- list stuff should be part of the main infrastructure. Could a subscription list for users be implemented in the OSM server? JOSM could be used to set the user subscription on nodes and ways. A per-user subscription list would simplify the server code removing the need for all the "clever bits of code" that the Xapi wiki page talks about. PS: is there a bug tracking system for the OSM infrastructure? All I could find is OpenStreetBugs but it deals with errors in the map, not in the infrastructure. -- Gioele <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
