Looking at the OSM edit history for a region I’m interested in, I see it is extremely cluttered by changesets where the changeset bounding box contains the region, even though nothing was actually edited in the region. To take a recent example, http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/11954514 covers a large fraction of the world even though it contains just two edits of single points, neither of which is geographically relevant to vast majority of users. In the region I last checked, the most recent 14 edits were all of this type.
I wonder if/how the interface could be modified to exclude such changesets.
The first method I can think of is to exclude changesets which do not have any points/lines in the desired region. A possible downside of this is excluding edits of large features, for example national boundaries, which are relevant to users in a smaller region. Also it might require a large increase in server processing power.
A second method would be to exclude any edit that is larger that a certain large size (like 10 degrees lat/lon).
Either way, excluding these data should be an option (by checkbox) rather than forced behavior. But as long as it’s still possible to see every changeset, I think an option to “exclude non-local edits” or “exclude very large edits” would be helpful and informative.
Thoughts?