OpenStreetMap
After fighting the user interface, both here and after installing JOSM on my system, I’m inclined to just forget about OSM for now. Something needs to radically change if the local contributions are of any value here. I simply do not have the time to attempt to master a very broken u.i.
I understand the concern for those who use a language other than English and making a translators job more difficult, but this suffocates the ability to use colloquial terminology particularly here in Australia, words that may be accurately descriptive in the USA or UK may have a totally different meaning here in some circumstances and this degrades its usefulness to ordinary users and for contributors it makes finding the appropriate tag for an edit extremely difficult. Yes we speak English and watch television created in the US and UK, so we kind of understand foreign meanings but that doesn’t mean we are prepared to give up our local descriptions and adopt different spellings and meanings, just like we are not prepared to change to driving on the “right side of the road”. OSM will never reach wide acceptability here in Australia unless more people are prepared to contribute and without radical changes to the usability of the editing interfaces, few people will bother to contribute. My first impressions are that design by committee has produced a fundamentally broken product. The only way OSM can compete with mega entities like Google or to some degree Apple who do use OSM for a some of their content, is to enlist more local contributors and allow more local input into administration of the community, at the moment OSM is very US or UK centric. Both Google and Apple have user contribution ability built in to their apps and it makes their product much more usable for their users. I hate to see just two companies dominate in the product space and I had hoped that OSM had the potential to compete but after attempting to make a useful contribution the edit interfaces have dashed that hope. I have extensive knowledge of the Barossa Valley, Northern Adelaide and Riverland, I could have made some valuable contributions but I don’t have time to waste on broken editing tools that require tertiary understanding to use properly. language=en-AU location: Gawler, South Australia
Discussion
Comment from jimkats on 25 January 2024 at 18:00
I have no opinion about the differences in linguistics, even for English itself in region-by-region, but it’s for sure something that is a known issue (that is, making a tagging scheme that would make sense in as many different cultures as possible), and the community tries to achieve that wherever concern arises.
Now something else, why would you go straight away into JOSM if this is your first time contributing at OpenStreetMap? JOSM is designed mainly for experienced mappers who want a better control over the quality of the contributions. iD editor, the default editor of osm.org, should be sufficient enough for a newbie mapper.
Also, there’s the OSM’s wiki which describes the tags and most of their values, and by that you can choose which describes best what you want, and not judging only by the tag’s value itself, because exactly as you said, the same term can have different meaning elsewhere. Even between US and UK English there are different meaning of the same terms. That’s why the wiki exists. And if a case isn’t covered already in there, a proposal can be made about that, or ask the community beforehand just to be sure you didn’t miss it.
Comment from Pieter Vander Vennet on 25 January 2024 at 23:07
JOSM is not a beginners tool - far from it.
There are other tools out there, try e.g. https://mapcomplete.org
Comment from MxxCon on 26 January 2024 at 02:23
iD, RapiD, EveryDoor, StreetComplete, GoMap!! are all much more beginner-friendly tools compared to josm.
Comment from End0fLine on 26 January 2024 at 03:27
More specifically, the Australian Tagging Guidelines seem really fleshed out and might be of use to you. They also list contact information if you have any questions or need assistance.
I understand it seems you might not be interested in using the wiki or having to send a message for assistance, but even with US English, I keep the wiki open all the time. It is an invaluable resource.
Comment from End0fLine on 26 January 2024 at 03:32
There is also OSGeo Oceania, which may cover the “… to enlist more local contributors and allow more local input into administration of the community…” portion you spoke of.
The description off of their website: “OSGeo Oceania is a volunteer organisation devoted to growing and enabling the OpenStreetMap and Open Source Geospatial communities in Oceania and the surrounding nations. We welcome participants of all skill levels, from hobbyists to professionals, engaged with mapping in Oceania.”
Comment from fossilised on 26 January 2024 at 21:18
I will try to clear some misconceptions, the tool I actually used to make an edit was the browser interface at ://www.openstreetmap.org I think you call it iD, my frustration with this tools misbehavior, was what made me take a look at JOSM just to see if it was any better than iD. I didn’t attempt to use josm to commit an edit. Didn’t take me long to work out that josm was more difficult to use than iD and It was quickly purged from my system without blinking. I thank a user slice0 who reached out and helped me with the edit at Changeset: 146656721 so that I didn’t leave a mess. As you may or may not have guessed by the username fossilised I am not a young man, but I have been a computer user since about 1983 and used an Apple mac at work in the late 80’s and early 90’s I didn’t use a Windows computer until 1996. I lost interest in windows at about win 10 and adopted Debian GNU as my daily drive. I still use a GNU OS but lost interest in Debian when Buster was released and changed to an Ubuntu based system because it is a much more user friendly OS and other members of my family find it much easier to use and don’t complain as much, I’m no stranger to a learning curve. My point is that there is no need in this day and age for an operating system or user interface to be so unfriendly. I use the example of Ubuntu and other Debian like OS’s like Linux Mint which are Debian derived because they prove that there is no need for user unfriendly systems and internal politics are the reason for the degradation and the reason there are so many forks.
I am an experienced user but I often wonder why user friendly features are slowly depreciated in favor of cli options. I could site many specific examples but I’m already way off topic. Your UI is much more difficult to use than it needs to be and I wonder if internal politics are preventing improvement. (first impressions) In my experience there is usually an agenda for persisting with systems that are unnecessarily difficult to use and Judging by some condescending comments that have been made, experienced users may actually like a pig of a system because it solidifies their position. (more first impressions) Contrary to comments made I have spent many hours reading the wiki, reached out for help when needed and still think that the browser interface is a pig and needs considerable improvement. Personally I would be embarrassed to be an administrator in a community that thinks that the tools initially offered are suitable for those who are are learning, because they’re not. The consequences for a community like OSM is that you will not recruit enough new blood to remain relevant or have enough people to improve in a world where technology is moving so rapidly and you might even get forked. I thank those of you who’s comments are generally helpful and I will check out the suggestions that you have made.
I wont make any more edits until I’m confident that I can make useful contributions and will do more reading before I make a decision to stay or leave. If you think that I ‘m judgmental about the OSM community and the difficulty of using the tools offered and the reasons that the difficulty persists then your right, I’ve read a lot of stuff on the site, quite probably more than you think. I can see that politics are most certainly in play. I have also seen by the “users near me” that there is a very high number of new users who have dropped out, have none of you noticed or ever thought to wonder why?
Leave a comment, ask and you will receive. Fossilised
Comment from vorpalblade on 29 January 2024 at 13:30
There is a (partial) “translation” to Australian English. If you want to improve/fix something, please contribute at https://translations.launchpad.net/josm/trunk/+pots/josm/en_AU/+translate .
As a JOSM developer, I would be very interested to know what (specifically) is broken about it. Please keep in mind that JOSM has a small developer team. As in 1 effective full time person, maybe 2 during a “good” month. And most of the effort goes to bug fixes or features that the developers are interested in.
So if you want a ribbon UI, that is not happening (we just don’t have the resources). If you just think that the UI is “ugly”, open JOSM Preferences ->
Display-> changeLook and Feelto something besidesMetal. If you don’t like any of those, theFlatLafplugin (JOSM Preferences ->Plugins) will add some more.Metalis probably what you are using by default, since the “better looking” ones are more likely to have issues.Yep. If only because we don’t have a tutorial to handhold people through the first steps; we do have a wiki walkthrough (the
Getting Startedsection of the start screen has the link). We also tend to encourage hotkeys for common actions instead of constantly poking at the user interface.Have you tried https://rapideditor.org/edit ?