On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 10:19 AM, Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> wrote: > It is also unrealistic to expect good OSM data edits every time. Still it's > good if people try, and good if the software helps them with it.
Agreed. >> IMO the job of the software should be to make sure the person knows >> the software has the ability to use comments. Not to make it >> difficult for them not to use comments. > > The software should also try and make people understand what comments are > good for, i.e. why it is good to enter one, and perhaps give some > information on what constitutes a "good" comment if the user is interested. I disagree. This is something which should be easier for non-programmers to edit. And it is something that should be consistent across different editors. > You are right if you say there is no metric to measure the usefulness of a > comment in software. > > However, I have just randomly selected 100 comments of less than 10 > characters from the current end of changesets, and 100 comments of more than > 10 characters, and there was a very noticeable correlation; in my > non-representative sample, I found about 70 of 100 long comments useful, and > I found about 10 of 100 short comments useful. I think we've already determined that your idea of "useful" is different from mine. > So while the software cannot *ensure* that people place a meaningful > comment, it can certainly help with that by reminding the user if it seems > likely that his comment is one of the "10 of 100" rather than one of the "70 > of 100". I wouldn't be so certain. I think you're more likely to see longer and longer useless comments. I'd rather encourage people who don't feel they can come up with a useful comment to leave no comment at all. And for people who want to leave a not-very-useful comment to use as few letters as possible. It's much easier to filter, that way. _______________________________________________ josm-dev mailing list josm-dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/josm-dev
