[Tagging] Long Tail ( was Removal of "amenity" from OSM tagging)

[johnw]

> On May 19, 2015, at 2:24 AM, Clifford Snow <clifford at snowandsnow.us> wrote:
> 
> You might ask, so what is keeping people from editing?


We don’t need to speculate. It’s easy to understand what is holding people back.

It’s the same thing that hold people back from replacing the brakes on their car - there is a lot of knowlege and technique needed to do even a simple car repair job correctly - and when presented with that reality, people walk away from the job and have a “pro” do it. 

There is no "slow process" to being exposed to the OSM data editing process, and that means digesting the entire tagging structure in a very short period. When people realize this, they walk. 

As far as I can tell, the differences between novices like me and more power users is a) using JSOM or similar, and b) using relations.  that is an insanely high bar to jump over. 

Video games walk you through the control scheme, interaction model, and basic weapons when you first start. they don’t give you everything all at once in the middle of a boss fight and expect you to learn and enjoy it.

But that is what is expected in OSM - even with how good iD looks/works.

you can pick up “Street Fighter” and mash buttons and the characters move. Professionals know all the esoteric combos to make the fighters do advanced and amazing things, but that complexity is not presented to the beginning user. 

If you load up iD to add a tag for your business (and, lets say, the building itself) - you need to know Amenity= building= shop= opening_hours, landuse= how to tag driveways, parking, street numbers, and a whole lot that most users have trouble digesting - to say noting if the existing map looks like it does in Tokyo or london, or nothing at all in less mapped areas - all the existing complexity (or complete lack of anything) is very daunting. 

I think that all of that information is useful and necessary, but there is little way to have the mapper tag those things without understanding all the rationales and nuances of all those tags.

there’s no preset “I want to add a business” or “I want to add a park”  tutorials that walk through the basics and hold your hand, bring up options and ask you natural language questions to help you learn how to tag things. a person who just wants to add a node tag can have very little asked of them, and the node placed in the correct spot. another mapper can flesh it out later. 

Its like learning brain surgery by having a brain presented to you your first day of kindergarten - Only a small percent of the people will naturally be interested enough (or understand enough) to be able to interact with something so complicated when it's presented to them. 

And this is without all the weird inconsistencies, omissions, and probably unnatural language used in the tagging scheme - which goes on top of all of that. 

Javbw
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