Ed,
Hillsman, Edward wrote:
I used to think this way, but for the past couple of months I've been
mapping to support three separate goals: a research project that
involves importing bus stops, inventorying shops and points of
interest for an area bicycle map, and preparing for a walk-trip
planner like the University of Maryland's. Each focuses on different
features in a common part of town. If I reference bus stops in the
changeset comment, the student who is doing the programming on the
bus stop project can pull up all of my changesets and immediately
identify which ones he needs to look at. He's told me how useful this
is. If I reference inventorying shops on a street with street name,
the students in the bike club can do the same for that.
Thanks for that "changeset comment success story" ;)
But, I haven't yet adopted the discipline of doing just one
activity's worth of mapping in a changeset. When I inventoried the
shops on one street, I also mapped the proper location of the bus
stops, and edited both in one changeset (actually a series of
changesets because I didn't get it all done in one session). And from
Steve's comments, I'm not alone in doing things this way. It is just
easier for me to record everything I see in the series of photographs
I take of, say, a strip mall and its setting, than to do just shops
in one changeset, close it, open another, do the bus stops, move to
the photos for the next strip mall, and repeat.
Of course. I think it would be going too far to actually expect mappers
to close an editing session (often losing some context) and then reopen
it just to make another kind of edit. We don't want to reach a point
where newbies e-mail SteveC complaining that they got turned away from
OSM because the community demanded too much of them ;)
Changeset comments don't have to be perfect. If everyone aimed at not
writing silly ones, that would be already be a big step forward, and
yours seem to be safely in the "useful" zone.
Maybe in the long run, power editors like JOSM will allow you to keep
mutliple changesets open at the same time, switching between them by the
click of a button, or even allowing you so easily sort and filter edits
(all those with bus stations, in changeset 1, all others, in changeset
2). But that's something for the (rather more distant I assume) future.
I think it helps if one keeps in mind what Peter said: "I always read
what my co-mappers are writing." - your changeset comment is a message
to other humans who work with you on this, whether you know them or not.
Trying to send them a meaningful message, and thus treating them with
respect, is what counts.
Bye
Frederik
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