I am likely to upload some massgis building data (for my town, where I'm the active mapper, and will be entirely able to straighten out any small issues). I've never done anything other than normal editing, so I'm reading the wiki surrounding imports thoroughly before starting. This note mentions things that I find confusing or incomplete.
I don't want to edit the wiki without being sure, so for points 3-N I will look at the consensus of comments before doing that. For points 1 and 2 I am not proposing to make any changes myself. 1) At: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import it talks of an import catalog. It would be nice to have Category:import or some such on all import discussion pages, and a link to the category page, since the pages are a richer description than a line in the table. 2) At: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines section Create a Community there is an authoritative-sounding reference to a single 3-year-old simulation that is based on assumptions of user behavior. While the study is an interesting exercise, it doesn't prove the thesis. I know different people have different views on this issue, but the text is very definitive and doesn't feel like it fits the (wikipedia rule that we don't have here, I know) NPOV notion. FWIW, I got interested in OSM when I found out that the massgis road data was present, and have been working mostly on things other than roads. So I don't fit the user assumptions in the simulation, and I think the other mappers I know don't either. This isn't really important but I thought I'd mention it, because I've heard privately from people that they find the anti-import tone offputting (as opposed to the 'this is hard; be careful' tone, which people seem fine with). 3) I understand the duty to be able to revert if things go wrong. At https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Revert there probably should be discussion of the issue with large changesets From JOSM not being handled by the JOSM reverter. 4) The section about using JOSM for uploads at: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Software does not caution about the problem with revert plugin and the >10K changeset. So I wonder if it's better to use an upload script that handles errors better, after doing the quality control in JOSM. Or maybe it isn't? 5) The import software page cautions aginst using the live API for testing. Probably this should go further and suggest that any import first be performed against the dev server enough times taht it can be done without any issues. 6) The dev server page is a bit confusing: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Using_the_dev_server That seems to be about getting shell accounts, and indicates approval is needed (makes sense), but it doesn't explain the plan for user accounts on the dev instance. I think the concept is that anyone can sign up, and that no shell account is needed, and it's perfectly fine to put bits into the server, and the server will be reset to a copy of the real database occasionally (and unpredictably). A brief section pointing to http://master.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/ and explaining this would be helpful. Or perhaps it's someplace else already. A specific question is: is it ok to share passwords between real and dev? I'd guess not, but it would be good to say that.
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