> On Sun, 4 Oct 2009, Richard Weait wrote: > >> 1. What first brought your attention to OSM? A magazine article? A >> web site interview? SteveC's FLOSS Weekly interview?
I think one of my friends shared an article about it on Google reader. I thought being able to create & edit maps without buying arcGIS was wicked cool. >> 2. What made you decide to get involved and join this list? I was having fun but lost. >> 3. What is the trickiest part about starting with OSM, for you? Can >> you suggest how to make this tricky thing less-tricky? The trickiest thing for me is that I am not a programmer. I don't speek leet, I have never edited a wiki page, I joined my first listserv last year, I don't own a GPS, and I am not a database administrator. So there are a lot of things that confuse me that are obviously old hat to those on the "newbies" list- who are, it appears, new to OSM but not to collaborative programming/ data projects. There are no answers on the wiki for questions like "what is a tag?" or explanations of how tags work in OSM. For that matter, it's hard to figure out what a way is. To someone approaching this from the world of maps, "way" is not an obvious term for all lines. (to me, "line" would be more intuitive). And the fact that all areas are continuous ways is confusing to someone looking to add features to a map that, when you look at it, has areas colored in- but then the area=yes tag doesn't turn your circular way into an area unless it's the right sort of way. It took me a long time to realize that there were such things as relations, and what they are. I still don't really understand what they are. I can't write scripts and there are no instructions that I understand on the wiki for learning that skill. I tried using JOSM for editing, but when I was unable to resolve upload/ download issues I returned to Potlatch, which is an ideal tool for me. What would help? Those who write on the wiki (maybe including me someday!) keeping in mind the perspective of a geography geek as opposed to a computer geek would help. As a geography geek, the questions of "what are the defining features of a canal, and how can it be symbolically represented" are interesting and resolvable; questions about which slippy tile I'm on are not. (I still have no clue why they're called slippy, or tiles, or whether they slip and how or why). A glossary would be nice- searching for a term will unearth debates about it if it's a tag, but for something like "slippy tile", searching won't produce a definition, a history, a non-technical description of function. Despite my vast ignorance I'm having fun and (I think) contributing usefully. But I need a newbie-er newbies list than this to become competent. That said, stumbling around is remarkably useful to learning, and I have had the patient assistance of a few users who discovered me mucking around and making a mess, and set me up better. So I appreciate that, and to others, imitate the good example I've seen and don't assume that people "should" know better- we all know what we know and then we know more by sharing. Aspen (eulochon) _______________________________________________ newbies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/newbies
