woodpeck
commented
1 year ago Related issues: #636 (which is 10 years old and was closed due to being a "duplicate of about 500 previous tickets"), #3242 - another possible solution for the issue you describe would be to only show changesets that actually have edits in the area you are looking at, rather than having edits all over the planet that create a huge bounding box.
Since you explicitly discuss "bad actors", you would have to find a way to keep such bad actors to simply mark their changesets as "vandalism" or "vandalism revert" and thereby evade scrutiny.
AntonKhorev
Problem
The current history browser does not visually distinguish and minimize screen real estate for vandalism changesets and their corresponding revert changesets. This often leads to an inflated number of changesets that obscure local and relevant modifications with meaningful longevity. As changesets with large bounding boxes (bbox) are loaded, it impacts the ease and effort required to review data changes that are truly within the local area of interest to the user of this feature.
Consequently, genuinely meaningful edits are less likely to receive critical peer review. This situation creates vulnerabilities: subtle bad actors can operate under the radar, genuine mistakes by new contributors may go unnoticed longer, and opportunities to mentor and integrate novice editors into the community are missed.
Description
Minimized Collapsed State for Vandal and Vanadal Revert Changesets
Changeset Flagging: Implement a mechanism that allows the OpenStreetMap community or specific privileged users to flag changesets as "vandalism" or "revert of vandalism."
Once flagged, these changesets would be rendered in a hyper minimized, collapsed state within the history browser list by default. Clicking on the collapsed changeset would reveal its details for those who wish to investigate further. Contextual Hover: Displaying changeset details or bbox information upon hovering over the collapsed item could further enhance utility.
More Compact List View for All Changesets
The first suggestion naturally also leads to consideration of improving screen real estate efficency per changeset for run of the mill changeset such as having an option for a more compact representation similar to options provided in other software with rich lists such as a gmail or O365.
Ideally, the batch of changesets would render so that all changesets in batch can be viewed at once without scrolling to make hover highlighting of bbox and corresponding changeset and vice versa an effective tool for inspecting an area of change or seeing which area is impacted by a changeset.
I include this second suggestion here because such work could lay ground work for the first suggestion which I see as complementary because I envision the means to mark/curate changesets could potentially be a hairy one to solve correctly to everyone's satisfaction.
Justification
Implementing the above features will:
Enhance Usability: Streamline the history browsing experience, making it easier to focus on local or specific changes.
Improve Accuracy: Enable users to more efficiently identify and correct vandalism or mistakes.
Save Time: Minimize the time needed to scroll through, investigate, and understand the change history, thereby accelerating workflows.
Screenshots
No response