Revert tools rules

Hello - Andy from the DWG here.

The wiki pages that you link to include a few caveats (including technical caveats). Sometimes the technical knowledge needed really is quite high - for example this page says “It utilizes the Overpass API” but that has a few impacts on freshness of data and frequent usage limits that people (even quite experienced OSMers) may not understand, because these things aren’t always particularly well documented. Similarly, the JOSM page doesn’t warn about the likely length of process (it can be very interactive) and the perl scripts don’t warn about the flags that can be set to make reverts more likely to either succeed completely or not happen at all.

It’s pretty rare for us to set explicit rules around revert tools beyond what the wiki page says. When we do, it’s usually because they’re used as an alternate to discussion (sometimes by both sides in a dispute).

Quite often we find that when people ask questions like this that there is a specific reason - something that they have just done has been reverted. Sometimes there is a valid (or at least partially valid) reason for that revert, but actually both sides in the dispute need to talk to each other rather than (a) reverting or (b) just remapping what was reverted.

In most cases the best place for a discussion about “how best to map X” is actually this forum, since as well as the “initial sides” in the dispute, it’s visible to everyone else too.

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