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I don't want to sound a grouch or a spoilsport. But what's with all the hashtags?

More politely, I'm not on any teams. I don't know who Victor N. Sunday is. I'm no longer qualified to be a Youth Mapper. My task-driven changesets include the project hashtag, but also naturally the above and many others.

If a project is open to all, regardless of affiliation, and the hashtags are applied to every participant's changeset comments, aren't they rather diluted? Team projects will get many hashtags from non-teammembers, so they're inflated from a "team metric" to a "all contributors to this project started by this team -metric". But then, project creators create the hashtag set and could guess in advance the rough number of changesets the project will need.

So I'm curious what their common use is. My best guess is that for the "more organized" projects out there, and on sites like Missing Maps; it's just nice for participants to have another metric. Seeing all the map improvements pour in with your group's hashtag could be encouraging and motivating, and serve as a bit of gamification to keep them mapping. Is there more to it?

asked 22 Jul '21, 15:42

Joel%20D%20Reid's gravatar image

Joel D Reid
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Lately I've been hitting the comment length limit very quickly and had to just delete some hashtags to make room for, you know, actual changeset comments. -.-

(23 Jul '21, 03:37) Joel D Reid

Hi Joel, it's a good question. I wrote a lot of tasking manager projects when I worked for MSF and I think that hastags covered: the org (MSF), the project (generally Missing Maps), the location (where the area of interest was) and also the focus of the mapping (buildings or road networks or residential areas, etc). Looking at the latest MSF projects, it looks like the last hashtag type is no longer used...

I also looked up Victor's projects and you're right! That's a lot of hashtags. I'll reach out to Victor and see what that's about... I'll also check what guidance there is for tasking manager project leads on the hashtags they use (each of these people goes through an onboarding / training).

Thanks for raising!

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answered 23 Jul '21, 07:11

pedrito1414's gravatar image

pedrito1414
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accept rate: 100%

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Thanks for the great answer. I actually omitted my main complaint: all training says 'leave good changeset comments' but everyone sees all the hashtags and thinks that's good enough; so comments aren't comments anymore. Anyway, thanks again.

(23 Jul '21, 11:55) Joel D Reid
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question asked: 22 Jul '21, 15:42

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last updated: 23 Jul '21, 11:55

NOTICE: help.openstreetmap.org is no longer in use from 1st March 2024. Please use the OpenStreetMap Community Forum