Hi,
Ben Last wrote:
And I've tried to discuss it on a few occasions, and not had much of a
response :) We've (at this point) ruled out asking all our users to
register separately with OSM
Maybe worth taking a clue from Cloudmade here, who have a similar
situation with their Mapzen editor - they go through some effort to make
the process as painless as possible for their users while still
requiring them to register with OSM *as well as* with CM.
Maybe my Google skills are sadly lacking, but I spent a while looking
for information on this. There's some discussion of the freietonne.de
site back in January, but nothing else significant.
I'm pretty certain there was some kind of web-based tag editor just
before OAuth was finally set up but I cannot find the mailing list
references. There wasn't a huge discussion back then - it was clear to
everyone that what that editor was doing could be a proof of concept at
most because the account would soon be banned otherwise.
Nor is there
anything on the wiki; the OAuth section discusses technical usage, but
there is no statement about proxy editing, the section of automated
edits doesn't cover this. Note also that this is not anonymous
editing; the identity of the user submitting the change to us is
tagged with every edit.
One reason why we disallowed anonymous editing is to make sure that
community members can always be contacted by other community members if
their edits are worthy of discussion in one way or another. Do you have
a strategy of how do deal with incoming messages for the "nearmap" user?
Will you assign staff to forward these messages to the appropriate
individual?
Previous discussions, IIRC, took place in the days before OAuth. Now that we
have OAuth on OSM there is even less reason to allow editing without an OSM
account.
I'm not sure I agree. We don't want to put barriers in the way of an
average user (and I use that term to explicitly distinguish between
the average map site user and a mapping enthusiast) making simple
corrections such as adding address information or naming un-named
streets. In particular, we don't want to bounce them to the OSM site
to register (and face yet another set of terms and conditions), when
they're already registered on our site.
As I said, without knowing the internal Cloudmade procedures, I am
pretty sure there will have been a number of people in that organisation
who'd have said "are you mad, every additional signup button loses us
50% of people..." but still they do what they do. For a reason, I guess.
I'm not saying that we have to implement it this way, but up until
this point we've not been aware of any great community disapproval of
proxy editing as a principle. I can absolutely understand that it's
not something that should be undertaken lightly, but I hope by now
that many OSMers will appreciate that we continue to do a lot of
support OSM, and that we do take the integrity and reliability of the
data very seriously.
I kind of understand your situation but I think the way forward would be
to either use OpenStreetBugs or set up an OpenStreetBugs like system
yourself, maybe integrate that in your editor - so that users without an
OSM account can only place OSB markers, and those (the slightly more
advanced users) who have an OSM account can then pick these up and fix
OSM data properly. Maybe you can even do that in a way that lets people
"start easy" in your application and then progress if they feel more
comfortable with it.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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