Auto-generated Changeset Comments

General talk
6

Yes, they could have been auto generated. In fact, to my experience it would seem that in most cases changeset comment would benefit from automatically generated comments, compared to what currently gets into them (fixed useless text like “fixed the map” or “updated the data”, wrong/reused previous comment, lacking any useful information etc.)

It is not that many bits; but I’ll give you that it is certainly nicer and faster to have in one easy human-readable line, then to have to open and parse all data to auto-generate that summary.

Note that I said “in most cases”, not “all cases”. (See e.g. my comment in issue requesting possibility to modify changeset comment at Confirmation popup before upload · Issue #68 · Zverik/every_door · GitHub). But in majority of cases, comment field could (and maybe even should? it’d have much less human error that way!) be autogenerated IMHO.

Critical things I want to know from a comment:

OK, let’s what is actual purpose of changeset comments, as opposed to other changeset metadata.

was this a remote edit or on the ground, what was it based on if it was remote, for example was it based on material gathered during a survey.

there is source=* changeset metadata for that, IMHO there is no pressing need to duplicate it in the human-readable comment field (or at least no need to type it manually; it can be added automatically by editor for convenience if we find it useful). Also imagery_used=* etc.

Was there any noteworthy motivation for the edits?

In majority of the cases (not all of them, buy say certainly more than 90% in my experience) it is “because mapper thought the map should be made better here”. Is there a value of adding that text to 90%+ of changeset comments?

Specifics in most cases are not important, and might be privacy-invading ("I added those tracks because I went there with bicycle there and plan to recommend it to my friends" or “I added tactile_paving here because I have blind friends which use this route sometimes”, “Added roof shapes and colors because I get kick out of looking at https://streets.gl”, or “categorized pubs here as I plan to visit all of them in next month!” )

And so on.

Feel free to specify more, I do not think reasons mentioned so far add useful information compared to autogenerated comments.

I too agree that autogenerated comments are just fine for 90%+ of the cases (more likely 98%+ in many cases, but let’s be conservative here).

Looking at suggested data to add:

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