[OSM-talk] Culvert and average contributor

[Greg Troxel]

  Question 1 : is "culvert" commonly used by native english speakers ? Is that
  a term mainly used by civil engineers ?

I understand it to be a passage under a road that isn't big enough for a
vehicle - maybe a 0.5m pipe for water, or maybe just big enough for some
animals, but a human going through a culvert would be abnormal.

  Question 2 : if not, is it normal that OSM average contributor has to use
  these technical words just to make the civil engineers happy ? Don't we take
  the risk to exclude more and more average contributors by adopting such
  technical vocabular ?

In my opinion, one of the broken things about OSM is the insistence on
making up names and not adopting existing professional terminology.
Coming up with names is often about a taxonomy and that requires a fair
bit of thought.  When a relevant professional community has done this,
we should just use their definitions.  That doesn't mean we can't give
readable explanations.

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