Last month, OpenFlights moved to Github, and today we’re rolling out the first new feature enabled by this: airport edits on Github.

Until now, any edits to airports not submitted by yourself were sent by e-mail to a perennially backlogged review queue, which at time of writing has some 200+ edits waiting for review.  The downsides to this were legion: aside from the wait, there was no sensible way to distribute the load, no visibility into the status, and no way to prevent duplicate copies of exactly the same edit piling up in the queue.

Effective immediately, edits are instead posted as issues on Github, like this. This means they’re visible, so you can search and see if anybody else has reported the same thing; they’re automatically deduped, so that edits to the same airport (as determined by ICAO code) get added as comments to the existing issue; and they support “subscribing”, so you can get notified when it’s commented on, accepted or rejected.

And what’s more, you can now help.  Head over to https://github.com/jpatokal/openflights, “Watch” the repository, and configure how you’d like to be notified for new issues.  You can then review any edits and tell us if you think they should be accepted or rejected, making our job that much easier.

For time being, the autogenerated issues are pretty crude, you’re offered a chunk of SQL that you need to eyeball against any potential dupes.  We’re planning to upgrade this to a cleaner diff soon, and expand this to cover airline edits as well.

Gitting better every day,
-jani