[Talk-us] Tagging of county roads

[Apollinaris Schoell]

On 27 May 2010, at 16:12 , Frederik Ramm wrote:

> 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"" ;-)
> 

this in't a german wikipedia article, posts are personal opinions not facts

> 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.

usability on all levels is important. the absolute newbie will use Josm, Potlatch presets. and learn the key-value pairs easily. but if we do heavy translation into cryptic codes this makes it difficult for no reason. Why does osm use xml instead a binary format like shape? it opened the GIS world to all kinds of people with technical skills. Going forward we need also attract normal people and some of them may turn into experts. Building artificial walls anywhere from POI adding to imports, writing bots, … is bad. Wherever there is no good reason to make things complicated let's keep it easy for any experience level.

> 
> 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").

Mike answered this already, and this is easy to prove. activity on talk-us is practically 0, compare it with and canada and their population size it's obvious, the number of active mappers is only a handful even in large metropolitan areas. 

> 
> 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.
> 

I didn't call for drastic action at all. I am not SteveC. All I like to see is to do things in a way that we don't scare away mappers and back to the initial topic don't map for the renderer 

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