[OSM-talk] [OSM-talk-fr] Continued aggression against French contributors (cadastre integration)

[Jérome Armau]

Keep in mind that we're trying to make the openstreetmap project accessible
to a larger share of the population. In every single country, that means
appealing to a non-computer-geek crowd. For example, the usage of "-Djosm.
home=<dir>" is dark magic to most people. Even though it's acceptable to
most users of this list who are well used to the inner workings of their
computer system, it's just plain wrong to advise any non-power-user to do
this.

In non-English-speaking countries, that also means that the average
contributor:
- does not have a very good command of English (beyond the tagging
standards)
- does not know about services such as Google translate

I'm confident a significant portion of French, German, Italian and Spanish
contributors are in this case. These people are not represented on this
mailing list, but need to be taken into account in these decisions.

On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Cartinus <cartinus at xs4all.nl> wrote:

> On 10/18/2012 09:44 PM, Christian Rogel wrote:
> > By the way, could you stand receiving any message in a language you
> > cannot understand. that seems to be looking for
> > infuriating the non-English speaking users?
>
>
> On 10/18/2012 10:30 PM, Eric Marsden wrote:
> >   - the way in which DWG is undertaking its monitoring+blocking, by
> >     sending aggressive messages to contributors in a language which they
> >     can be presumed not to understand
>
> <sarcasm on>
> So a requirement for the membership of the DWG should be that you are a
> polyglot. Of course all messages about issues in country X should be
> send in the official language and those of all known minority languages
> of the country.
> <sarcasm off>
>
>
> I think it is more reasonable to assume that any contributor to a
> multinational open project like openstreetmap knows how to use
> <http://translate.google.com> or any other such service.
>
> The continued use of the argument "the message was not in French" is
> just silly. You don't have to like that the lingua franca of the
> internet age is English, but if you want to be heard in projects like
> OSM, you better accept it.
>
>
> ---
> m.v.g.,
> Cartinus
>
>
> P.S. No, English is not my native language.
>
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> talk at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>
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