[OSM-talk] Barriers of Entry

[Jaakko Helleranta.com]

I very much like Ian's idea. Coincidentally I talked about this with some people at SotM.

It seems to me that a number of people have started editing osm after a significant delay because they've felt the barriers badly (both regarding tools and technical creation of the map as well as fear of breaking the data). I remember these fears / issues being one cause for my delayed start to contributing to osm.

Now, what if we had a more or less obviously "optional" (opt-out) graduated access scheme?

What if we simply required the promise of users to say that "I know how to edit this & that feature", "Sure I understand what tertiary roads are over unclassified/residential -- and I promise not to tag all roads I edit with tertiary!", "I'll definitely look into empty nodes history before deleting them to make sure that no one has deleted the tags by accident", or "Of course I won't mess up the coastline". Etc.

What if we simply trusted that people can recognize when they are able to do certain types of "more difficult" edits?

There could also be an "I'd love it if someone more experienced (or self-confident) could double check that my edits are ok before they get submitted to the live database!" option.

Since there were multiple people at SotM who think they would have started editing sooner than they ended up doing I'm wondering how many people there r out there that have signed up but have never made an edit that could already have made edits if we would have such options in place? I'm also pretty confident that such options, even when set to be voluntary, could reduce some common quality problems. 

Cheers from Haiti (which I think would benefit from some of the above mentioned options),
jaakkoh

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-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Sergeant <isergean at hih.com.au>
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:02:08 
To: ce-test, qualified testing bv - Gert Gremmen<g.gremmen at cetest.nl>
Cc: Talk Openstreetmap<talk at openstreetmap.org>
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Barriers of Entry

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