Respect other's work

Guys,
I have several times noticed cases when my edition have been completely removed and replaced with a new one, not necessarily the better. I’m personally do not understand reasons to do this, but let’s add another simple rule to our community:
If you think you going to delete or do a major changes at some place, try to contact user who worked on this place before (formal “owner”). If his edits are wrong - he will learn, if not - there is always a place for debate.

That of course doesn’t include cases when this place was heavily changed.

I understand the frustration of seeing changes you do not understand in the map. However, contacting the previous owners before updating or changing to the map is not practical.

In the same line of thought you expect from other contributors, I would assume you have contacted the person/s that made changes you could not understand and asked him why? As you wrote: “If his edits are wrong - he will learn, if not - there is always a place for debate.”

At the end of the day, it is just a question of of who takes the initiative of making the contact, and should that be before making a change or after a questionable change has been made. I would suggest the veterans of this forum would take the initiative to contact the novice and help proliferate their knowledge to the community.

Let me give an example of some changes I’m doing recently. I’m using GPS recordings to increase the accuracy and coverage of off-road trails. Sometimes that implies replacing existing roads with new GPS-based roads. It is far from practical to contact each owner of a replaced road in advance. If I, or anyone else, made an error while attempting to improve the map, please feel empowered to provide specific and constructive feedback.

Hello yrtimiD,

of course you are right that there should be communication. We should always respect the work of others.
But I can’t contact everybody because I’m changing a road junction that somebody created a while ago.
I’m not even checking who did the last edits and why. I’m simply doing my best to make the map more detailed and correct mistakes.

But I understand what you mean. I did a lot of very detailed work in Massada some years ago and it was deleted when I checked a while later.

Can you give us some example?
Did you contact the user regarding this edits?

I mean, do we talking about a re-movement of a city or change of a highway junction or what?