Richard Fairhurst schrieb: > So why do people get it wrong? And I'm not doubting that they do. > > Well, one of the reasons is that our beginners' documentation is the > weakest part of the whole caboodle. Put yourself in the position of a > newbie. You're not sure what to do (as Chris Schmidt observed on > #irc, "editing topology is hard") - you may not even realise that the > roads have to link together. So you click the nice "Help/Wiki" link > on the left. There's a big button marked "Beginners' Guide", so you > click that. > > And then it all goes wrong. > > First step: Collect Data. Erm - maybe. I don't think I need that, I > just want to draw a tram line along this road. And it's telling me > something about a collaborative mapping project for Korea. Maybe I'll > skip that? This map thing is harder than I thought. > > Second step: Upload Data. Help. I need to upload something? What's > that? I have to save my files to GPX, it says? And "download it into > JOSM for editing"? What do all these strange letters mean? > > It's insane. The user doesn't even know what Potlatch is yet, let > alone JOSM. They just clicked "Edit" to add 500m of tram line. > > What would be the single best patch anyone could contribute to OSM > right now? Rewriting the beginner docs from scratch. I'm 100% serious. >
I totally agree. The documentation needs to be organized better. Many things are repeated on several pages, others are inconsistent with one another. I already worked on many of the german pages, but I don't think that my english is good enough to work on the international ones. It's hard to make good documentation even in your own language.. Greetings _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
