Groundspeak Portal

Today a number of edit suggestions were submitted for existing waymarks in Switzerland. There were about 20 that came in for various categories in which I serve as an officer. This is the first time I've seen more than a single edit suggestion come through in a day, and suddenly being exposed to a bunch of edit suggestions really highlighted some issues.

So I thought I'd start a topic for general discussion about edit suggestions.

First - I believe this question has been raised before, but can we please have a way of knowing who is suggesting the edits?

Secondly - it appeared that most (if not all, I haven't looked at them all yet) of today's suggestions were being submitted simply to add a 'region' selection for the country. This by itself normally would have made the review process easy, but for most of the edit suggestions I have looked at so far, edit suggestions for the description fields (quick and long) have been included in the edit suggestion. But the descriptions (some of which are very long) appear to be unchanged in the suggestion. And on these suggestions, the 'Provided Reason' is blank.

I suspect that the edit suggestions for the description fields are somehow unintentional, given that I haven't found any difference, and the 'Provided Reason' is blank. So that leads me to believe that something about the process of submitting an edit suggestion might be causing the description fields to show up as 'suggested for edit' when the submitter didn't intend to make any changes to those fields.

Some of the description fields are very long, and I can't see comparing the old and the new, character by character, to see if there is really a change in there someplace, and if so, if it is a good suggestion. In fact, I have no plans to do so. It is impractical to think I can compare such long strings (some of which are not even in English).

I can't even contact the submitter of the suggested changes to see what the intent was, because we don't know who is submitting edit suggestions.

Any thoughts?

(i saw all those too)

yes, who.....

and the review edit page is way too cluttered and not easy to read or determint what has changed....

thoughts:
sign your edit proposals....

clearly state what you changed in the reason box.....

if it wasnt changed, dont show it on the review edit page....

my opinion:

This entry was edited, but what part is new? Only the people who suggestd it knows.
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This entry was edited, but what part is new? Only the [strikethrough red text=people] [green text=waymarker] who [strikethrough red text=suggestd] [green text=suggested].


thus: i only have to read one paragraph.....

and is adding a 'state' an edit suggestion, or adding missing info? at least the ones i saw a while back said: 'we just added the 'state', as it was not chosen)....

I approved one of the edits. Same as you describe.

I approved the region change and I mentioned that I was approving the other thing as it didn't look like there was a change.

I also let them know that I was going to fix a spelling typo I happened to notice, and I did that after I submitted the approval.

That was me. Sorry for bugging you all! If I knew about the issues before, I would have been much more selective and cautious.

Because the state/district field can be used in filters I considered them to be important enough to add them when missing. I would use the region filter when travelling in Switzerland, but most Waymarks did not appear then. Apart of that I have corrected three or four obvious typos mainly in the title field and three wrong coordinates of places I know, one of them with an offset of 80 km.

I also have noticed some issues with editing WMs. When you edit a field, you are asked to give reason for that. But sometimes, this happens for untouched fields. These are often coordinates, I can think of an explanation for that. I guess this has to do with rounding errors regarding to the different possibilities of input like decimal degree/degree, decimal minutes etc. Another thing are dates that appear with trailing zeros in month and day you have to remove to get accepted.

But other untouched fields sometimes ask for justification where I do not see any pattern at all. This happened not very often, maybe in one waymark out of five.

In short: Whenever you change something, the reason field appears. You are forced to fill in something. After submitting sometimes the form reappears and asks for reasons for untouched fields. I think it is technically not possible to submit forms with empty reason fields. But it has never been the long description. The fact that you received the long description as changed, looks like a bug in the background not visible to the editing person.

fi67:

That was me. Sorry for bugging you all! If I knew about the issues before, I would have been much more selective and cautious.

Thanks for posting, fi67. No worries about bugging me - I'm just trying to see if there is a way to separate your actual edit suggestions from the ones that appeared to have come through unintentionally.

fi67:

Because the state/district field can be used in filters I considered them to be important enough to add them when missing.

Sounds like you are using the edit suggestion feature exactly as it was intended to be used.

fi67:

In short: Whenever you change something, the reason field appears. You are forced to fill in something. After submitting sometimes the form reappears and asks for reasons for untouched fields. I think it is technically not possible to submit forms with empty reason fields. But it has never been the long description. The fact that you received the long description as changed, looks like a bug in the background not visible to the editing person.

This definitely sounds like a bug.

So I think it's safe for me to assume that if the 'Provided Reason' is blank, you did not suggest an edit for that field. Therefore, as I (and others) review your edit suggestions, we should only consider the suggestions for which a reason is provided.

I agree with chapterhouseinc that it would be very helpful if the review edit page could clearly highlight the differences between the original and the edit suggestion in large blocks of text.

Yes, your assumption is pretty safe, although not waterproof; you probably could cheat by providing a space as reason. I have not tried it, but I think this would get through.

Clear and highlighted display of the changes would really be a great improvement for the process. But it looks like the editing feature has not been used that often, so maybe for Groundspeak it's not worth the effort (yet) to create a fancy, easy to use interface. Another thing is to include the name of the requesting person, I thought this would be obvious.

i too approve of your edit suggestions. keep them coming.

this is why they were 'introduced', to fix the many errors one might find.

now, if we could locate a few more in other parts of the world.....i postulate that this too will eventually become a waymarking niche: those who 'correct' waymarks....

a note about the 'region' field....
in beta all you had were countries, and the US had states.....as other countries became more active, they needed regions too.....as of several updates ago i believe that most are complete.

an issue i saw with selecting a region was posting in New Zealand. after selecting the country i waited on the region to load. it would briefly appear, but not long enough to register my selection.......the might be the case on other marks as well...

fi67: how would you feel about you name appearing after the edits?

the coords or region gives that 'area' of the mark a 'this waymark was edited by fi67 on 3/15/10'...

the description would have a line at the bottom: 'this description was edited by fi67 on 3/15/10'...

the variables: 'variables were edited by fi67 on 3/15/10'...this could even appyl when someone completes variables on a visit log: 'variables were completed by fi67 on a visit log posted 3/15/10'

I just noticed that the following fix was listed in the 1/10/12 Waymarking,com Release Notes:

"13212: Waymark edit requires reason for variable change when no change was made
Coordinate change control was detecting a change where none existed. Fixed"

This problem originally was seen in the 10/29/2009 release. Based on what fi67 reported, it sounds like it might not be completely fixed for all fields yet (like the description fields).

I also just noticed that on 10/29/2009 bootron indicated that the identity of the person submitting the edit suggestion should be shown. I guess that fix just hasn't made it in yet.

chapterhouseinc:

fi67: how would you feel about you name appearing after the edits?

I think it makes sense to track edit history (who changed what when) on Waymarks, but I'm not sure that information belongs directly on the Waymark page itself. Maybe a public link on the Waymark page that takes you to a separate 'edit history' page would make sense for Waymarks that have been edited.

chapterhouseinc:

as other countries became more active, they needed regions too.....as of several updates ago i believe that most are complete.

At least France is still missing. I live close to the border and have posted three or four. And for Switzerland these regions are a bit uncommon, this subdivision is defined somewhere, but it's very academic, nobody uses them. Cantons would be better, they have two-letter abbrievations as the U.S. states. Every local knows them and they appear everywhere: license plates, newspapers, addresses... But as far as I am the only currently active Waymarker living in Switzerland (there are some others regularly posting holiday waymarks, but they live in France, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic...), nobody really cares...

chapterhouseinc:

an issue i saw with selecting a region was posting in New Zealand. after selecting the country i waited on the region to load. it would briefly appear, but not long enough to register my selection.......

This was a problem indeed a few months ago, but it works quite well now.

chapterhouseinc:

fi67: how would you feel about you name appearing after the edits? the coords or region gives that 'area' of the mark a 'this waymark was edited by fi67 on 3/15/10'... the description would have a line at the bottom: 'this description was edited by fi67 on 3/15/10'... the variables: 'variables were edited by fi67 on 3/15/10'...this could even appyl when someone completes variables on a visit log: 'variables were completed by fi67 on a visit log posted 3/15/10'

I thought about it a while and I don't really like the idea. I personally would not care when somebody edits my waymark and then it has his edit notes on it. But I would not like to appear on somebody else's.

The original poster owns the waymark, and although improvement of the data is alway appreciated, having someone else's name on it could make some people feel like their postings tainted or partial hi-jacked or the like. I don't have the name of every craftsman, who has done something in my home, on my door plate.

The review process prevents from Wikipedia-style edit wars, but there is still the possibility of unnecessary bad feelings between people.
If the edit notes would be where the visits and comments are, this would be accepted much better, I guess.

cache_test_dummies:

I just noticed that the following fix was listed in the 1/10/12 Waymarking,com Release Notes:

"13212: Waymark edit requires reason for variable change when no change was made
Coordinate change control was detecting a change where none existed. Fixed"

This problem originally was seen in the 10/29/2009 release. Based on what fi67 reported, it sounds like it might not be completely fixed for all fields yet (like the description fields).

This fix was for coordinate variables only.  The control itself was doing some rounding thus it was reading a change.  It does not seem to be consistent on the description fields.  Sometimes it detects a change and sometimes not even when no changes were made.  I just put in reason... "No change" and continue on.

fi67:

At least France is still missing. I live close to the border and have posted three or four. And for Switzerland these regions are a bit uncommon, this subdivision is defined somewhere, but it's very academic, nobody uses them. Cantons would be better, they have two-letter abbrievations as the U.S. states. Every local knows them and they appear everywhere: license plates, newspapers, addresses... But as far as I am the only currently active Waymarker living in Switzerland (there are some others regularly posting holiday waymarks, but they live in France, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic...), nobody really cares...

I believe they use the same region settings as are used with Geocaching.com and I know they don't have regions setup for France on that site either. More and more countries are getting regions added.  In some cases I think it makes sense but in other cases it doesn't.  And as you have seen when they are added they are not auto-populated and someone like yourself has to go back and get it done.... keep up the good work. 

I know I flooded a bunch of peoples emails when the edits first came out correcting the 100+ waymarks listed in Alabama that were elsewhere (caused when Alabama defaulted when US was selected)

CTD: yes, maybe a tab on the waymark for 'edit history'....

fi: yes, in posting some of my UCMs i noticed that it was not easy to figure out the 'region', and thus i left most blank.

yes, but in the off chance that someone starts showing signs of editing marks incorrectly we could put a stop to it. maybe someone wants to verify something that was added in an edit (as bruce said, wikipedia is citing waymarks now). we might could steal their footnote idea - you just became '[1]' on many waymarks next to the region......

seems like you show sign of the old waymarking mantra. 'ownership' doesnt mean very much anymore.....

bruce: yes, the 'void' changes do appear random, and yes, please say 'NC' if you did not change it.
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i hav been thinkink maybe we need some new search paramaters:

in the case of 'missing regions'--on the 'advanced search' page i select all waymarks, located in X country, then have an option for the regions

Country:
New Zealand
Regions:
North Island
South Island
Not Listed

thus, one could quickly determine those that need a region added....so when France gets a region list FI could use this sorting process to whittle the results down until they all have a region.....
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in the instance of searching for uhauls:

ok, first off we post waymarks and select countries and regions[states]. Uhauls are only going to be present in the US and Canada. so, on the 'uhaul advanced search page' with all waymarks selected the country dropdown would only include US and Canada.

then the region dropdown would only include the applicable regions with a posted waymark. so if there are no Uhauls posted in Montana, montana would not be selectable in the uhaul search dropdown.

so therefore:
Georgia Historic Markers would automatically be limited to
C: ->US,
R: ->AL, ->GA (yes, i believe there is a GHM in Alabama), ->and maybe a 'not listed'

Texas HMs:
C: ->US,
R: ->TX

Australia/NZ Benchmarks:
C: ->OZ ->NZ
R1: ->Queensland ->Victoria [as these are the only 2 regions with posted marks in this example]
R2: ->North Island ->South Island ->'Not Listed'

Czech Benchmarks:
C: -Czech Republic
R: -> Hvlani ->Liberecky ->Zlinsky ->Not Listed

what about these questions:

ok, fi suggests an edit to a waymark:
1) all officers in that category get a notice. does the waymark owner?

2)the approval/denial is complete: who gets a notice [suggester, owner?] and what does it say?

-i got one as an owner a while back, and found it just as complicated to decipher as the edit approval page.

-what when i approved the region, but declined the description (nothing changed)?

3) can we get reviewer note boxes for each edit suggestion?

-so i can say region changed on that approval, and no change when declining the description edit.

4) can edit approvals get their own tab on the group/category page? so then the waymark approval que history is seperated from the waymark edit que history.

-can the suggestor and approver be included on this result?

BruceS:

cache_test_dummies:

I just noticed that the following fix was listed in the 1/10/12 Waymarking,com Release Notes:

"13212: Waymark edit requires reason for variable change when no change was made
Coordinate change control was detecting a change where none existed. Fixed"

This problem originally was seen in the 10/29/2009 release. Based on what fi67 reported, it sounds like it might not be completely fixed for all fields yet (like the description fields).

This fix was for coordinate variables only.  The control itself was doing some rounding thus it was reading a change.  It does not seem to be consistent on the description fields.  Sometimes it detects a change and sometimes not even when no changes were made.  I just put in reason... "No change" and continue on.

fi67 didn't indicate specifically when (recently, or back before the 1/10/12 release came out) this problem was experienced, but I took it to mean recently.

In any case, even if the unchanged-coordinate-rounding-results-in-reason-prompt problem has been fixed, it sounds like there are two others:

1) Sometimes untouched description fields are treated as if they were changed, and a Reason prompt appears (as you mentioned above).

2) Sometimes untouched description fields are passed through to the edit suggestion reviewers without the submitter realizing it (and therefore no Reason can be provided)

fi67 - did I summarize that correctly?

cache_test_dummies:

fi67 didn't indicate specifically when (recently, or back before the 1/10/12 release came out) this problem was experienced, but I took it to mean recently.

Yes this was recently, I have not noticed the edit button until three or four days ago. There is a problem with coordinates, that is probably not solvable from a mathematical point of view. There are three option to enter the coordinates: DMS, MinDec and DegDec. You simply cannot translate from one to the other without rounding differences. These may only be fractions of inches in the real world, but the application does not care about how much, it just notices it's a different number. My default used to be DegDec, becaus my primary used GPS device has this output. Yesterday I switched to MinDec; I think that's in the database. And in fact the incident ratio went down from 7 out of 10 to about 1 out of 20.

cache_test_dummies:

1) Sometimes untouched description fields are treated as if they were changed, and a Reason prompt appears (as you mentioned above).

2) Sometimes untouched description fields are passed through to the edit suggestion reviewers without the submitter realizing it (and therefore no Reason can be provided)

fi67 - did I summarize that correctly?

That is absolutely correct.

Just two things to add:
When you change something, the reason promt appears immediately. This is usually not the case with the untouched fields. They appear only after submission and the application acts as they had been there before but left blank.

There is also an issue with date fields, I have mentioned before. They should have the format d/m/yyyy, trailing  zeros are not accepted. But what comes out of the databases is dd/mm/yyyy, thus you have to remove trailing zeros, which is a change request, technically. An example with real numbers: The original poster enters 1/1/2010. When you edit the waymark, you get 01/01/2010 in that field and have to delete the two zeros to be able to submit.

chapterhouseinc:

2)the approval/denial is complete: who gets a notice [suggester, owner?]

I submitted an edit suggestion yesterday. The suggestion was approved. I received the following email:

Thank you for submitting your edit suggestion(s) for the 'United Church of Christ in Keene - Keene NH' waymark. The managing group has completed their review with the following outcome:

Street address" Variable: Accepted

Reviewer's comments:
no explanation provided

fi67:

There is also an issue with date fields, I have mentioned before. They should have the format d/m/yyyy, trailing  zeros are not accepted. But what comes out of the databases is dd/mm/yyyy, thus you have to remove trailing zeros, which is a change request, technically. An example with real numbers: The original poster enters 1/1/2010. When you edit the waymark, you get 01/01/2010 in that field and have to delete the two zeros to be able to submit.

Oh right - I saw some of those come through on your recent round of edit suggestions.

So just to keep the summary going here so the information isn't lost: we've identified four problems that result in confusing circumstances for those submitting edit suggestions and those that have to handle the reviewing:

1) Sometimes untouched description fields are treated as if they were changed, and a Reason prompt appears. Suggestion: to help the reviewer, submitter should add a reason such as "no change".

2) Sometimes untouched description fields are passed through to the edit suggestion reviewers without the submitter realizing it (and therefore no Reason can be provided). Suggestion: reviewers can generally decline (or accept, it really shouldn't matter) description edit suggestions that come through without any reason specified, as these were likely and apparition of this particular problem.

3) Rounding on coordinate data due to the use of different coordinate system can result in what appears to be, but isn't, an intended change to the waymark. This results in a 'Reason' prompt. Suggestion: to help the reviewer, submitter should add a reason such as "no change".

4) Leading zeros on otherwise unedited day and month values in date fields need to be removed during edit suggestion process. This forced unintended edit results in a Reason prompt.Suggestion: to help the reviewer, submitter should add a reason such as "no change".

cache_test_dummies:

1)[...]Suggestion: to help the reviewer, submitter should add a reason such as "no change".

2)[...] Suggestion: reviewers can generally decline (or accept, it really shouldn't matter) description edit suggestions that come through without any reason specified, as these were likely and apparition of this particular problem.

3) [...] Suggestion: to help the reviewer, submitter should add a reason such as "no change".

4) [...] Suggestion: to help the reviewer, submitter should add a reason such as "no change".

I fully agree to all your suggestions (provided they're a temporary workaround), and that's exactly what I've been doing since I noticed a problem.

BTW: I did receive some emails regarding edit approval, but only a small fraction. The majority of the edit requests were approved without feedback.

fi67:

I fully agree to all your suggestions (provided they're a temporary workaround), and that's exactly what I've been doing since I noticed a problem.

I hope that these issues can be addressed and the workarounds become unnecessary, but my guess is that some of these issues are tricky enough that they'll likely be around for some time. I added the suggestions for people who may come to this topic later looking for help on the best way to to work within the current limitations of the edit suggestion process (both from the submitter and the review standpoint).

fi67:

BTW: I did receive some emails regarding edit approval, but only a small fraction. The majority of the edit requests were approved without feedback.

How strange! As I posted above, I received a confirmation email for an edit suggestion that was approved. I wonder why this would only work happen some of the time? Don't know if it matters, but I had previously recorded a visit on the waymark for which I provided an edit suggestion.

In any case ...

5) Edit suggestion confirmation emails do not always get delivered to the person who suggested the edit after the suggestion has been accepted. Note: I don't yet have any information about what the suggestor experiences if the suggestion is declined.

welcome to waymarking, forcing you to find workarounds since 2005......

i suggested an edit to the lighthouse linked in a post this morning in another thread...there was no region

so i added US and Georgia. i wonder if i will get conformation about that? would this be something that is fixed on a visit log, or does that just apply to variables?

even as an officer edit in a category, wouldnt it be nice to send the 'owner' a note saying it was edited?

and i had at least 1 roadside attraction edited (thats a different story), but the edits looked like a crappy waymark, and i know i did a better job when posting...after some discussion i accepted it, but still, that makes me look bad.....

you know, the director get to sit in the editing room and have some input on what gets cut out of the movie....

ok bruce, you (and several others) sorted out the state issue, reguarding wrong states and such.

but i have seen several marks lately with no location at all. i corrected one i think. but here is this one (its mine) WMM5M, is there some way to filter 'this location choice'. and correct them 'in one fell swoop'?

are these affecting the stats (country/region counts)?

today i suggested new coords for a waymark.

i got an error and had to take a leading '0' off a month in the date variable. my comment was: did not change the date.

chapterhouseinc:

today i suggested new coords for a waymark. i got an error and had to take a leading '0' off a month in the date variable. my comment was: did not change the date.

This is caused because the date format changed from mm/dd/yyyy to m/d/yyyy  there was change in the control for entering dates allowing older dates than before.  Thus if you make any changes to older waymark with date variables you will run into this error.