kieranrawley wrote:Why are you even considering this as a problem? Regardless of the tile build cycle rate there will be some edits that don't make the cut.

I'm sure many of us have encountered parts of the map which appear to have been left half-finished by the previous editor, quite possibly because they were in the middle of an edit when WME went down and they've then forgotten to go back and tidy it up the next chance they had to do some more editing. If we have editors forgetting to tidy up these half-completed edits when WME (generally) is only down a few times a month, how much worse do you think it could get if WME goes down every single day? The more opportunities WME gives us to have to remember to fix something that it prevented us from finishing, the more likely we are to forget to do it.

So even if the idea of re-engineering WME or the database backend to allow deferred edits is a bit pie in the sky, the basic concept of alerting online users that an update process is about to kick-off is hardly a big ask. If I login to my webserver just before some planned maintenance work, the greeting message tells me the server will be going down in x minutes. Similarly with my online banking service, which also provides in-session reminders of any impending shutdowns. So why not do the same for WME? Let people know their editing session is likely to be interrupted in x minutes, remind them as the clock counts down that WME is about to be pulled from under their feet, and they'll be less likely to end up forgetting that they needed to remember to finish off that half-complete edit, because they'll have been less likely to have started that edit in the first place.

kieranrawley wrote:Now you're introducing another issue altogether, one of incompetent, ill disciplined editors.

Forgetting to finish off a job if you're unexpectedly interrupted in the middle of it and are then forced to leave it for more than a few minutes (as is usually the case when WME goes down) is simple human nature. I've seen half-completed edits left by high-ranking editors (including CMs) who've proven themselves time and time again to be anything but incompetent, so suggesting it's a seperate issue isn't entirely true.

kieranrawley wrote:Don't force the programmers to divert their attention and precious time into putting a timer into WME.

Not that it ought to be a huge programming effort for someone with insider knowledge of all the Waze APIs and direct access to all the server resources, but OK then, how about they just give us a fixed location where the next scheduled update time can be reliably found by a script, so that one of us can provide this functionality as a greasemonkey add-on instead?

kieranrawley wrote:This is where CM's and the sandbox area come into play.

As noted above, CMs aren't immune from making mistakes. And whilst the sandbox is an incredibly valuable teaching tool that I wish had been available all along, by its very nature it's utterly useless at teaching us how to clean up interrupted half-finished edits.