[Talk-us] Why we really don't get new users

[Shawn K. Quinn]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014, at 01:17 PM, osm at charles.derkarl.org wrote:
> 
> I'm going to just point out the elephant in the room here. I don't think
> any normal user cares about the license at all. I think the actual reason its
> hard to get new mappers, especially those that are not nerdy and obsessive
> like myself is that *the ontology sucks*. There, I said it, so you don't have
> to.
> 
> It's actually a few things related to how the ontology sucks:
> 
> 1. The tagging of things bears little resemblance to things in the real
> world:
> 	a. A lot of common things just don't have standard tags: examples: tax 
> preparers like H&R Block, investment brokers like Charles Schwab, medical 
> marijuana despensers here in California, recreational MJ shops in
> Colorado. I 
> could go on. 
> 	b. the whole shop/amenity debate
> 	c. common things that have really stupid tags, like barber shops

a. The pot shops need to be standardized, one way or another. I can see
different tagging for recreational versus medical but either way, I'd
like to see us standardize on something for each and be done with it.
b. Not well versed on this one...
c. If they are really stupid, we should either find something better, or
if there is nothing better just stick with what we have with a note to
the effect of "we know this is stupid."

> 2. To be a useful mapper, one needs to memorize these arbitrary tags. It 
> wouldn't be so hard if it weren't arbitrary (a salon is a shop? and it's 
> called a hairdresser‽). But even if it weren't arbitrary, it'd still be
> hard to remember because things have synonyms, and no shop is called a chemist
> in the US.

That's where editors like iD come in that remember the idiosyncratic
cases for you. Or at least, that's what I thought that feature of iD was
for. I find the UK-centric terminology a bit annoying as well but I've
learned to deal with it.

> Corrolary: A bagel shop is a bagel shop, no muggle cares that a bagel
> shop is fast_food amenity that sells the bagel cuisine.

shop=bagel you mean?

I don't really like this one, I would prefer amenity=cafe (or
amenity=fast_food) and cuisine=bagel myself.

> 3. I went to a shop recently that sells espresso drinks, and gelato, but 
> markets itself as a chocolate maker. (Specifically: Snake & Butterfly,
> Campbell, CA). There is absolutely no sane way to tag this in OSM today.

amenity=cafe
cuisine=coffee_shop;ice_cream
shop=chocolate

That's the best I can think of. Yes, it's a bit ugly.

> 4. The wiki is a terrible platform for documenting the ontology because
> it's not machine readable and it's just a slow way to get information.

What do you propose we replace it with?

-- 
  Shawn K. Quinn
  skquinn at rushpost.com