On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 4:18 PM, David Earl <[email protected]> wrote: > On 16/12/2008 15:58, Richard Fairhurst wrote: >> Magically giving JOSM to newbies doesn't stop them making mistakes. It just >> means they make mistakes with JOSM rather than with Potlatch. > > That is indeed true. > > However, what makes Potlatch particularly susceptible to people making > mistakes is the live editing. In that respect it is very unforgiving. > > You've gone some way to addressing this for people who don't realise > this is what they are doing, though I suspect some still don't read > what's in front of them. > > Throwing out a tools because it is "too easy" isn't the answer though. > Improve it - and JOSM and the rest too, yes. But we could also work on > Quality Control. We could be authoritarian and have edits checked before > release - but people won't like that. Or we could make sure people are > doing sanity checks on the area they know.
Absolutely. Wikipedia haven't succumbed to the "Disable TextArea Finally" campaign, despite how easy it is to make mistakes when editing pages. I'm glad I don't have to download a java program in order to fix typos :-P It's about time to mention that the features we're bringing in with 0.6 aren't designed in themselves to make accidents less likely - they are "merely" the foundation stones needed in order to build useful "Rollback and Monitoring" applications. It's just that it's taking so long that 55,000 more people are using OSM than when we started, and I think most people are forgetting what the work in 0.6 was supposed to enable. So there's some more ideas as to how to help with the grumbles underpinning this thread: help with getting API0.6 out of the door (there's details on the wiki about how to help with client testing), or start designing how the ultimate "monitoring" program would look if I was looking at my neighbourhood and pressed the "Show me what's been going on" button so that we can pick up on mistakes regardless of how they were made. I'm sure there's some great ideas for visualisations out there in someone's head. Cheers, Andy _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
