vegard wrote: > Like it or not, potlach *is* the source of quite a bit of accidental > vandalism. It's easy to use for beginners, but they will *not* > understand the implications of what they are doing. The sanbox > helped a > lot, but obviously not enough. > > I believe you need some sort of online "buffer" for potlach and a > prominent "submit button" that everyone understand the implications > on. > Maybe even with a warning-page that you need to go through unless you > have gone to your preferences box to turn it off.
<sighs, copies and pastes previous answer at bottom of message> svn is... oh, never mind. Richard While I'm here I might as well say something about the lack of a Save button. I'm not violently against the concept: I think "unconvinced" is perhaps the best way to describe my opinion. There are two big issues with it. One is that for edit sessions lasting more than a couple of seconds, there has to be conflict management. If you're a JOSM user, then you are de facto a clued-up, computer-savvy type, so conflict management doesn't worry you. But if you are a newbie - maybe even a schoolkid - trying just to edit your local area, then being presented with "The following conflicts were detected. Accept/Resolve/Revert?" will just utterly confuse you, and you'll click the wrong thing and cause more errors. Or maybe just close Potlatch and never return to OSM. The second is that, in JOSM, your "canvas" is usually quite small - i.e. you have downloaded a particular area and are working on that exclusively. In Potlatch, because you can pan around an infinite map, your canvas may be much bigger. You may have traced a 600km cycle route (I know, I've done that! :) ) in one session. Yet you can't zoom out to see the whole thing, because requesting a 600km bounding box would break both the server and the browser. So you would be clicking "Save" to upload changes that you can't actually see or review, and that - in my opinion - defeats the point of it. But actually they're not my biggest problem with the idea. What worries me most, because I've seen it before, is that people are seizing on the first thing they don't like, and thinking that's the reason why there are bad edits. People used to criticise Potlatch for causing bad edits because there was no 'revert' feature, so I added a revert feature (the H key). Then they criticised Potlatch for causing bad edits because there was no 'test' mode, so I added a test mode. Then they criticised Potlatch because there was no 'splash screen' explaining things, so I added a splash screen. Now they criticise Potlatch because there's no compulsory 'save' button. But if I added a compulsory save button tomorrow, it wouldn't stop the bad edits. The bad edits are principally because these guys are newbies. Newbies make mistakes. (Experienced users don't make mistakes with Potlatch just because it has no Save button.) And in a week's time, someone would be saying "Potlatch must be banned unless it has a pony" (or something) and there'd be a lot of postings saying "yes, the reason there are all these bad edits is BECAUSE POTLATCH HAS NO PONY". And so, a few weeks later, Potlatch would get a pony, which would make it even harder to use (ponies are quite stubborn, you know) and require newbies to learn even more, and then someone would decide on another "reason" for the bad edits... and so on. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
