Hi Lester On 12/08/11 10:09, Lester Caine wrote: > Steve Dobson wrote: >>> It is interesting looking at the history for some changes and seeing >>> > what 'collateral damage' is being done to additional information by >>> > people who have yet to fully get up to speed with all the finer >>> points >>> > of editing. >> Playing devils advocate here - one man's 'collateral damage' is another >> man's improvements. As a newbie how do I know that my edits are `good'? >> One joins OSM and gets full edit rights to the database. I didn't have >> to pass any tests to show that I know what I'm doing. I've just looked >> at what has been none in other areas of the map and aped it. > > In reality these 'improvements' ARE at the expense of more important > information as has been shown here :(
In this one case I don't disagree. But I was thinking more about the general newbie problem: How do I know that my edits are improving things and not harming them? > In order to retain the 'open access' policy we DO need a little more > security such as the ability to selectively roll back changes or merge > back in the background material. Some people have put a lot of effort > into the finer details, so 'delete' SHOULD be a little more difficult to > action, and perhaps REQUIRE an added comment as to why something was > deleted? > > The new_id tag would need to be integrated into an API process related > to delete and other actions that can result in missing information. The OSM database does not enforce any method of editing and thus all methods are equally acceptable - at least to the code. This was probably a good thing at the start of the project. There were few contributors, and much work to do. But that is not the case now. As far as I can see much of the western world has got a basic map already there. I'm not saying that what is there is perfect. The effort needed is to improve things, but to improve things in the correct way. The `open access' policy of the code is not supporting that activity. I'm thinking here in terms of zones of commit access. The edits of a newbie, such as myself, to Eastbourne don't get committed to the database fully until they get approved by a "East Sussex" zone authority. Once the newbie as demonstrated that they can do things "right" then they can be promoted to a zone authority. Steve -- Steve Dobson _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
