URL parameter to pre-fill changeset comment (for HOT Task Manager integration)

[danstowell]

I've just come back from a big nice session helping many new mappers - humanitarian-motivated editors using the HOT Tasking Manager.

One of the recurrent UX issues that I noticed was that, after a whole session of looking at imagery and tracing buildings or whatever, we "expect" them to remember they're supposed to go back to the Tasking Manager and copy-and-paste some complicated changeset text such as

CAR crisis, refugee areas in Cameroon, Gamboula-Mbilé area, #hotosm-task-592; source=Bing

It's not iD's "fault" that HOT requests specific changeset tagging which is easy to forget when you're at the point of pressing Save. But would the iD team be open to adding URL parameters that allow us (from within Tasking Manager links) to pre-fill the changeset comment box? (And the source tag too, if that makes sense in iD's data model)

[pnorman]

Although I like the idea in general of being able to pass in parameters for defaults, it raises some concerns

• Will it encourage someone to use the same passed in changeset comment repeatedly instead of good changeset comments? They should be adding a few words about what they did, not relying on it being automatically filled with something machine generated
• Do we want to allow changeset tags other than comment to be passed in to allow automatic tagging of changests?

[danstowell]

Re the first point: Yes it will encourage someone to use the same changeset comment repeatedly - however this is exactly what HOT Tasking Manager asks its users to do, and this is very deliberate, it's part of the way HOT manages and tracks the "microtasking" work.

I don't think pre-filled changeset comments should be used more widely - I definitely agree changeset comments should generally say "what they did", but in a microtasking situation "what they did" is consistently the same thing.