[Talk-us] Community Involvement

[Richard Fairhurst]

Apologies for butting in on your mailing list - thought this one was
sufficiently non-US specific it deserved an answer.

Toby Murray wrote:
> Yes, navigation is a pain. The "map features" page is a pretty 
> good index of things to map but it often links to proposal or stub 
> pages (like the doctors page) that don't give a lot of information 
> about "how to map this feature" but rather offer discussions about 
> the tag or some OSM jargon that is not really helpful to 
> newcomers. The problem is that as one gains more experience 
> within OSM those pages DO become somewhat helpful so there 
> is little incentive for experienced mappers to change them to 
> make it better for new mappers.

We desperately need a real OSM Beginners' Guide (rather than the apology
that currently passes for one on the wiki), written by people who care about
documentation, focusing on the basics, and liberally illustrated with pics
and videos.

And I hate to say it, but it shouldn't be open to general public editing -
otherwise you get the situation at the moment where people come along and
add their personal hobby horses every other day, and it degenerates into an
unreadable, sprawling, unfocused mess.

It's not just about tag documentation (to a certain extent, better editor
presets are making that less important), but about a general introduction to
OSM. A DokuWiki install on dev.osm.org, with a small team writing the core
docs, would be a good way to do it. I'd love to have a go (after all, my day
job is as a writer and editor), but what with Potlatch and all don't have
the time to head up such an initiative. But it would be the single most
useful thing anyone could do for OSM right now.

I did suggest to Mr Weait of this parish that he might like to be involved,
as he has a clear track record in writing nice how-tos on his blog. Maybe we
could get a team together?

cheers
Richard
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