OpenStreetMap

Quick History Service Now Pointless

Posted by Dr Kludge on 17 December 2011 in English.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quick_History_Service has an override table. You can put someone in this table that has not accepted the CT. That override now makes the service pointless. It makes the tools in JOSM and Potlatch pointless too. If you don't redraw some issue that has been overridden, then you just might not see that part of the map when it is re-licensed some day. If someone doesn't want their edits flagged, then accept the CT and say that your contributions belong to the public domain.

Discussion

Comment from ceyockey on 18 December 2011 at 15:53

Are you saying that it is pointless in the LONG term or the SHORT term? From your description it would seem that the Service remains OK to support the current re-licensing edits, but not necessarily for long term license management.

Comment from Vincent de Phily on 19 December 2011 at 19:58

You seem to misunderstand the idea behind the "override" feature. It is meant to flag the rare cases of users who haven't accepted the CT, but whose edits will be dealt with in a special way. Sometimes, this is the case only for some of that user's edits. This is really a case-by-case override (there are only a handfull of cases so far), when a user cannot/will not simply accept the CT, but is some compromise is possible.

Manually replacing those edits would be a waste of time, so making sure that they are not flagged by the QHS is a good thing. You may think it's pointlessly complicating things, but it's just the technical tool helping us to deal with a complicated legal situation.

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