[OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

[Ruben Maes]

2015-06-28 20:34 GMT+02:00 Fernando Trebien <fernando.trebien at gmail.com>:
> On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 4:03 AM, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:
> When people are deleting and combining ways, they are editing
> invisible data - tags and parent relations. In a world without
> relations, combining different tags would still be an issue. For
> instance, the "sidewalk" tag is not visible. It should be visible. If
> it ever becomes visible, there is still a huge repository of approved
> tags that won't be. The current approach - concatenation - is
> essentially invisible in many situations (the user must pay a lot of
> attention at the result). I would like to see a scenario where a
> casual mapper (the target audience of all editors besides JOSM) would
> prefer not to be notified about a potential mistake. I do mapping
> sprints very often, I'm knowledgeable, and even so I prefer to get
> interrupted in my mapping whenever I do something potentially
> damaging. Without that, even with my experience, I would have broken
> data multiple times. How is that casual mappers would prefer not to
> have that? It is a contradiction to design the application for casual
> mappers and still place fastest mapping at utmost priority. A casual
> mapper is not aware of the data model, and should not be expected to
> be so.

Trying to be a bit objective here:
I have been teaching someone to edit OSM with iD and he was
demotivated by the warnings he got when clicking Save. He then had to
try to find out where the errors were, failed to do so and gave up. I
told him to just upload it and I fixed it myself.

So I believe that thinking you are ready and then having to deal later
with mistakes you made earlier is highly demotivating.


Eventually I convinced him to take the leap to JOSM. I had to explain
how the data is represented and it took him more time to learn (note
that JOSM made him eager to learn more about the actual data
structures!), but now he is more confident in editing ways.

I have not explained relations yet though and he broke some last week,
by merging ways (one was in a route relation and the other not). I
tried this and JOSM does not give any warning at all when you do that
in expert mode, but it does in non-expert mode. Apparently it was not
clear enough that data would break.


My conclusion is that editors should not try to hide too much, but be
didactic. Ideally they should confront mappers with what exactly the
consequences are of a certain action (and I realize this is very hard
to do, with the freedom of tags and such). In this case, a map with
the effect on the relation could have been shown.