Show only "self-created" problem warnings in novice mode?

[RicoZ]

not surprisingly, new users are frequently overwhelmed by the warnings. I think it would be very helpful if in the beginning they could be only shown the warnings for problems they have caused themselves and not those ancient horrors which are there because everyone else his given up to fix this or that multi-polygon.

Even for more advance users, I think it would be helpful to visually divide the errors+warnings into pre-existing problems and those that were caused by the current edit - even if the separation would be less than perfect.

[stoecker]

First it's not so easy to find what is self-caused. We would either need to remember old state or warning state before. And then compare them.

Second actually I don't like the idea. Either the data is ok or not. The "it's not worse than before" is no real validation.

For the people not wanting to fix old errors we suppress already many non-relevant errors.

[RicoZ]

As of the implementation I was indeed thinking that JOSM could silently do a validation after a download and compare that with the state before upload. I am aware that this is less than perfect.

For new users this may mean the difference between go on and give up in despair - it is the first editing experience which is often the most difficult one. Also imho new users should learn how to fix their own errors properly first and it is important for them to see which errors were caused by their actions and which are old ones.

[stoecker]

I doubt that JOSM is really the first-step tool for OSM editing without supervising. That is solved by iD. In JOSM the users should see the complexity of OSM data (present in a way which is as easy to understand as possible). Spending a lot of efforts to hide errors and warnings in modified objects seems not a good way to me (everything else is not displayed by default).

If there are overwhelming warnings, then we can fix them or degrade to info-level, but I don't see this proposal as a valuable investigation of developers time.

[RicoZ]

JOSM and Merkaartor were indeed my first OSM tools.

I have tried to ammend the JOSM guides in the wiki, maybe that is good enough.