[Talk-us] Tagging of county roads

[Frederik Ramm]

Apo,

Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
> totally disagree. if osm doesn't open itself more to non geeks the
> project will die as fast as many other open source or crowd source
> projects.

""Citation needed"" ;-)

There are different strands in this argument:

1. Should we use human-readable tags. My answer is "yes definitely". But 
this has nothing to do with making things simpler for non-geek users; au 
contraire, non-technophiles will depend very much on shiny UI that 
shields them from any tag, human-readable or cryptic. Having 
human-readable tags is important for the geek users who want to grep 
through their XML or place tags by hand.

2. Are we in a decline because we are not open enough to non-geeks. My 
answer is "no, we are not in a decline, we are growing" and this is 
supported by statistics. I challenge anybody to show me an area of OSM 
which is actually in decline or even in stagnation (as opposed to "not 
growing as quickly as someone has hoped").

3. Will the project die if it does not open itself more to non-geeks? 
Possibly, after the geek population has been exhausted, but that is 
going to be some time. I don't think any kind of drastic action is 
needed. This ship sails along nice and steady, and we need sailors to do 
all the work, but we don't need drastic course corrections.

"Keep up the good work" is the motto, and OSM will prevail.

Bye
Frederik