OpenStreetMap

PlaneMad's Diary

Lets have changeset mentions

Posted by PlaneMad on 3 April 2017 in English.

On an average, there are atleast 40 data reverts per day. Most changesets comments are non descriptive like revert previous change making it very hard for the community to track the action and any previous changeset or discussion.

It would be really useful if OSM implemented a changeset mention feature like GitHub, where if I fixed a changeset with a comment Remove duplicate features added in #47398827, it would automatically add a comment to the original changeset and notify the original mapper and anyone in the community know what action was taken. This would greatly improve the social aspect of mapping and link discussions over multiple changesets.

Any other cases where this could be useful?

Discussion

Comment from imagico on 3 April 2017 at 09:59

Actually mapper mentions would be at least as useful but likely not really feasible due to the extreme abuse potential.

Note what you suggest, namely to automatically add a back-referencing changeset comment is much more obtrusive than the github feature which just silently adds a back-reference without a notification.

Comment from ff5722 on 3 April 2017 at 10:41

or you could just be considerate and comment on the changeset that was reverted.

Comment from PlaneMad on 3 April 2017 at 12:39

Note what you suggest, namely to automatically add a back-referencing changeset comment is much more obtrusive than the github feature which just silently adds a back-reference without a notification.

Excellent, so lets have a back reference without a notification.

or you could just be considerate and comment on the changeset that was reverted.

Its already being done. My suggestion is to use mentions to make it easier to navigate from one changeset thread to another.

Comment from TomH on 3 April 2017 at 16:41

There have been many such proposals over the years - pretty sure there are tickets in github already.

Biggest problem is probably finding unambigous syntax for all the sorts of mentions (node/way/relation/changeset/user) that people want.

Well that and finding somebody that actually wants to implement it rather than just talk about how nice it would be of course ;-)

Comment from Stereo on 3 April 2017 at 16:57

@imagico reddit limits abuse by only sending notifications if less than three users are mentioned.

Comment from tyr_asd on 4 April 2017 at 08:11

Biggest problem is probably finding unambigous syntax for all the sorts of mentions (node/way/relation/changeset/user) that people want.

What about just using URIs as identifiers? Github shortens typed URLs to other tickets: http://github.com/project/issues/123 becomes #123. That should work for us as well (e.g. http://www.openstreetmap.org/<type>/<id> becomes type/id or something similar). For user mentions the @username pattern is already a well established.

Comment from PlaneMad on 4 April 2017 at 10:40

What about just using URIs as identifiers?

The OSM URIs are a great reference to start with. @ makes sense for usernames that can change and # for permanent ids. Also using the JOSM id shorthands for nodes, ways, relations can give a more crisp identifier:

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