>When I originally signed up I found the whole thing a tad daunting and >overwhelming originally, nothing was very clear about what it was I >was supposed to be doing, beyond fixing simple mistakes, or how to use >GPS traces to enter data that wasn't available from imagery.
I'd just like to make a comment on this newbie thing, having only just picked up on this thread. I ran a mapping party in Fareham, Hampshire, UK in which three newbies came, back at the start of November. These three newbies, who were reasonably adept at using computers but not "geeks", if you get what I mean, were able to successfully use JOSM - something harder than Potlatch, perhaps - to add street names to unnamed streets in Fareham. So I'm not sure that either editor is *that* hard to use given a proper demonstration. My own feeling is that the average newbie is more likely to want to contribute POIs or name roads than add completely new data. So maybe something which allows users to easily do that would be ideal. This requires more server side "intelligence" though... for example, the server needs to auto-detect if someone tries to add a POI with the same name and type within a certain distance of an already-existing POI, and reject it if so. If this was the case, then simple, lightweight AJAX-based editors, more restricted than Potlatch or JOSM but optimised for these sorts of tasks, could be built. Nick _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk