It is not that easy to damage relations in JOSM. Sure, you can, but you get blocking warnings: once, when you change the relation indirectly (perhaps breaking it), and another (issued by JOSM's very comprehensive validator) by the time you attempt to upload your changes. Both warnings stop your work (always! there's no way to turn them off), make you read, ask you to decide how to handle the situation, and are quite informative: they tell you where you acted and what was the result. It sure is a bit low level, but that is good teaching. If you do not understand what you read, you can then go search for help. But if you get no warning (as in Potlatch), you don't even know you need to seek learning about relations. It is very hard to argue that someone can "miss" both warnings "accidentally".
Can the user damage the relations with JOSM? Sure. But the user has been warned twice and should know what he/she is doing. They may ignore the warnings if they do not know what they mean, but then you have a better point to later approach the user and tell him/her to be more careful and read more about relations. If you do that to Potlatch users, it is totally fair if they reply: "How could I have known?" You can't expect them to re-read all that is written everywhere on the UI at every change they perform on the map. Potlatch should call their attention to important things (such as unintentional data loss). Even experienced users may accidentally destroy relations in Potlatch because of a short moment of inattention. In JOSM, you're always reminded. On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 9:08 PM, Bryce Nesbitt <bry...@obviously.com> wrote: > I think all three major editors make it too easy to damage relations. > > And that starting to damage a relation (by a user) is a perfect teaching > opportunity. > The moment someone deletes part of a boundary relation, > is the perfect teaching moment about boundary relations. > > _______________________________________________ > talk mailing list > talk@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk > -- Fernando Trebien +55 (51) 9962-5409 "The speed of computer chips doubles every 18 months." (Moore's law) "The speed of software halves every 18 months." (Gates' law) _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
