In your letter dated Mon, 29 Sep 2008 01:08:50 +0200 you wrote: > as OpenStreetMap draws more and more sophisticated users, we're > also seeing more scripts or, as they would be called in Wikipedia, > "bots", modifying data. > > 1. Make a plan of what you want to change, and discuss in relevant > forum (usu. mailing list). If there are many objections; drop the > plan. If there are few objections, maybe exempt certain areas or > objects created by certain people in order to respect their > objections. Remember that they can easily change things back again > if you act against their will, so don't even try to play the > superiority card. > > I would also accompany this by the notion that if you see an > automated edit that you believe has problems, and it has not been > discussed or documented, it's ok to revert it.
I think there should be two technical things in place: One thing is a structured way of rolling back edits. There should be a way of reporting large scale edits, and getting them removed from the database. The second thing is a reporting script that reports on large scale edits in a timely fashing. As far as politics go, I think that it would a good idea to just re-use the current structure for introducing new map features. Before you run a script you first propose it and only run it when enough people cast a vote in favor of running the script. For example, a good way of completely destroying the JOSM/Validator's duplicate node detection feature is to fill the database with a huge number of aumatically generated duplicate nodes. :-( _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
