OpenStreetMap

Some of the frustrations

Posted by Real_Estate on 5 September 2014 in English.

Occasionally, you can find yourself trying to help out those who know less than you about a local area than you do. I think it is sometime dangerous to overrule and Edit, based on a presumption that it must be somehow wrong. With OS, there has to be an element of trust in those helping with the edits. A lot of time and effort goes in from many people, and I would consider it foolishness to unravel an edit without actually visiting the sections of road in question. For those of us who use these roads on a daily basis; indeed it is extremely frustrating to feel that a ‘battle’ might ensue from time to time with those editors who clearly think they know more. Why for example would you revert a section of road back to one way which is completely wrong……IF you actually knew that road? My suspicion is that many of the reversed edits are by people who haven’t even been to the country in question, leave alone use the roads in question every single day!!

Discussion

Comment from Alan Trick on 5 September 2014 at 21:19

I haven’t been involved in any edits in your country, but there’s a few ways you might be able to stop the fighting:

  • Message the offending user or users (it’s possible the users don’t understand what they’re doing).
  • Add comments to your changes to explain them.
  • Add source=local knowledge tags to your changes.

Comment from Pieren on 6 September 2014 at 07:09

Add comments to your changes to explain them.

This is the limits of this “comment” system. In fact, nobody reads elements history and related changeset comments when they edit/modify a road.

Add source=local knowledge tags to your changes

This is probably the best solution (or source=survey)

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