[OSM-talk] Culvert and average contributor

[David Fawcett]

+1

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 8:29 PM, Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com> wrote:
>
>  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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