OpenStreetMap
Distribution of locales (languages) among HOT tasking manager contributors
Posted by dekstop on 9 November 2015 in English. Last updated on 5 January 2016.Inspired by recent Transifex discussions I though it’d be interesting to see what languages our contributors actually speak — to the extent that we can easily find out. It turns out that as of May 2015, iD now submits a “locale” changeset tag — JOSM has been sending that information for a while already.
The top entries across both editors are shown below, for May-October 2015 (inclusive). Note that a locale with a small number of contributors is not a locale that matters less – as we’ve established before, a small number of contributors can make a significant impact on the maps of a region.
There’s also a Google spreadsheet with separate tabs for iD and JOSM contributors, if you want to dive further into the data: “HOT contributor locales, May-Oct 2015”. Or as CSV files: combined, iD, JOSM. It’s interesting to compare their distributions. E.g. iD has a much longer tail, which I guess is not a surprise – browser locale vs limited JOSM translations?
UPDATE: Ilya Zverev has kindly amended the spreadsheet to also show translation progress for each locale!
Discussion
Comment from Zverik on 10 November 2015 at 08:22
This table needs more columns, for a number of translated strings in major HOT projects (TM, export, learnosm etc.).
Comment from dekstop on 10 November 2015 at 11:35
That’s a great idea! I’ve given you edit permissions to the spreadsheet.
Comment from Sanderd17 on 10 November 2015 at 14:10
What we speak, or what we read?
I speak almost 100% Dutch, but I normally set all my software to English. Not because Dutch translations are that bad, it’s just easier to communicate with others when using the same terms. I used to look up term after term when submitting a bug report, but now I don’t have to do that anymore.
Comment from dekstop on 10 November 2015 at 14:19
Indeed, as mentioned above this merely tracks the locale configured per editor – it would be much harder to establish what languages people actually speak :)
Comment from dekstop on 10 November 2015 at 14:21
But your point is well made. English use may be over-inflated in these stats because a fair amount of people might prefer to use that over other (native) languages.
And as usual, there’ll be all kinds of other reasons to choose particular language settings – including incomplete translations.
Comment from jonwit on 10 November 2015 at 19:22
Fantastic summation of where people are contributing!!
I did a quick pivot table and summarized the language by the first 2 letters using =left(a2,2).
English has 42% of the changesets as well as the same amount of users.
copy of the spreadsheet with my edits
Also I did a sum on the changesets on the first table and got 3,751,363
However when I combine both ID and josm i get 5,000 more? Im sure theres something im missing.
id 2,148,541
josm 1,608,182
combined total changesets 3,756,723
Keep up the great work!
Comment from dekstop on 10 November 2015 at 23:49
Nice!
And yes, well spotted – that must be a side-effect of how I structured my SQL query for the “combined” tab. Just had a look but I’m not entirely sure what’s going on there. I just managed to get three different counts for three different kinds of summation queries. OSM metadata is notoriously messy, and it’s late in the day… maybe an issue for another day.
Comment from dekstop on 10 November 2015 at 23:52
(To clarify – most of OSM metadata is neat and clean, however there are so many ways of contributing and so many tools that there’s always a small percentage of really weird stuff in the data. 5,000 mis-counted entries out of 3,000,000 ain’t that bad for now…)
Comment from simonmikkelsen-dk on 6 January 2016 at 13:36
I am from Denmark and speak Danish, but set my computer to us local in order to get better search results when I search for a text.