Validator: show meaningful tooltips

[mjulius]

In the list of Validation errors tooltips are shown when hovering over error categories. These tooltips seem to be always the same as the name of the error itself. This is not at all helpful.

It would be more useful if the tooltips showed a little more extended description like the ones from ​JOSM/Plugins/Validator#Validations

[Don-vip]

Ticket #9308 has been marked as a duplicate of this ticket.

[mkoniecz]

For me (as of today) the most mysterious one is "highway without a reference - Suspicious tag/value combinations". I thought that it is about missing ref key but I encountered it for way that had it.

[rickmastfan67]

Replying to Bulwersator:

For me (as of today) the most mysterious one is "highway without a reference - Suspicious tag/value combinations". I thought that it is about missing ref key but I encountered it for way that had it.

I think that might be a bug with motorways as I noticed it happening on several Interstates here in the US when I ran the validator. I've reported that separately as #9366.

[mkoniecz]

Would it be helpful (and increase chance of implementing this) to provide set of tooltips texts? Maybe by improving ​http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JOSM/Plugins/Validator#Validations

I also think that it would be a good idea to further expand this and add "explain" button next to "fix" in validator.

I remember that one of the most confusing things at start of using JOSM was avalanche of validator complaints (some were not even my fault bad something that was wrong even before my edit). I remember disabling it, I guess that at least part of users do the same and later never enable it again. A bit of explanation would be IMHO a good idea.

[GerdP]

Just stumbled over this ticket. We have added more info to the tooltips for #18810 but I guess this ticket is about better explanations what the error/warning is about? I fear this is never going to work since the dubious cases often show flaws in the code/mapcss rules and a longer text will not help in that case.

[mkoniecz]

In many cases (when I was starting) I was unable to understand what is the validator complaint - even in cases where it was not dubious and working as expected.

[GerdP]

Same for me. I guess nobody will claim to understand all messages, and a beginner will understand nearly none. I rembember that I (wrongly) expected the "Lookup" button to take me to a wiki or something that would explain why I see an error/warning, similar to your suggestion about an "explain" button. Looking at the vast number of tests and messages I see no way to implement tooltips, not even the links I expected as - handwritten - code, but maybe it would be possible to generate a link to a Ggle like search engine which could search the JOSM wiki and the Trac?

[skyper]

I did start to update the table under Help/Preferences/Validator, some time ago, though, it is still incomplete.

[skyper]

Ticket #14441 has been marked as a duplicate of this ticket.

[skyper]

As mentioned above, I think this would be a major improvement, especially for less experience users and beginners.

Would it help to have some anchors at the tables on wiki:Help/Preferences/Validator to offer some link to little more information?