On one of the mailing lists has been requested that mappers use the changeset comment in a more sensible way. However it has not very clearly been pointed out what information actually makes sense to put there, and I - as possibly some others - only have my own vague ideas about it.
Currently, this is:
information on the source (e.g. “source: survey” or “source: landsat”) unless this is put in the changeset’s source tag or source tags are added to the objects themselves
perhaps the focus or target of the edits (could be e.g. “correcting keepright issues”)
in case of changing other contributors’ work in a way that might upset them, it may be helpful to briefly state why you regard this as improvement
Not quite sure: is it helpful to give information on the location (country, region/city etc.) edited? This seems somewhat redundant as location information is within the data already.
Once I have gathered some feedback, I would like to add these informations on the wiki page about changesets.
Adding a meaningful comment is easy if you have made a well defined, even if quite large. change to an area. For example, mapping a hospital, adding a new road or marking an industrial area. It is much harder if you have spent time walking around an area with the map and have a string of minor and unrelated changes to make. For example, adding a missing street name, adding a new mail box, changing the tagging on a footpath because it now allows cycling. Add to that additional minor changes like correcting validation errors where a road doesn’t meet at a junction and it becomes a lot harder to create a meaningful comment. Hence comments like ‘minor changes and amendments’ or ‘added a few POIs’.
I guess the way around this is to create a series of small change sets but I am sure that that is not the way most people work.