That is true. Of course, the more mappers there are from some regions, the more influence they’re going to have at a project as a whole. It is what it is. So the tagging conventions are dominated by British English, and Germany is strong too. My own country of Croatia has much less influence, as there is much less of Croatian mappers.
However, I think the regional categories(communities) reinforce this tendency.
Hm, I find that strange. Imagine if Korean Discourse category did not exist (i.e. if it was deleted, or if it was never created in the first place). Do you think more Koreans would contribute to OSM and participate in discussions, or less? I don’t know for Korean case - but for Croatian one I would guess even less Croatians would participate if there were no Croatian category.
I believe that regional categories should be used to discuss topics that are specific to that region, but in practice they are used to speak the language of that region.
Many of the discussions are local. For example, in Croatian forum (and mailing list before), we’ve mostly been talking about how to tag things that are specific to Croatia, local imports, or about issues with local mappers. Much rarer are we discussing about tags that are used worldwide, but are not well defined for anyone so would benefit from whole-world view. When we do, we take it to the general tagging forum instead of discussing in our Croatian community, e.g. Tagging healthcare:speciality=* inside a hospital
As a result, the conclusions of those discussions are also stuck in the region where the language is spoken.
I don’t know your statistics; can you estimate how much of the issues you are having are local, and how much would benefit from wider-world view?
Sure. So does mine. Every region has its specifics, even when we try to invent tags to be useful globally.
I am trying. There are bigger cultural differences than just language being spoken, though. In the Korean discussions I’ve seen, most of the things that are common there I’ve never heard of before, much less seen with my eyes in my life. In some there were some similarities so I might offer some of my (european-centric) experience; in others, I could contribute nothing due to me not knowing anything about the subject being discussed.
Also note that while it’s easy to say that OSM is Europe-centric, Europe is very wide thing. I’ve been in more OSM Korean discussions then I’ve been in many country-specific forums that are European. It is also a question of volume and free time. Even I had 24 hours a day free to only follow OSM-related discussions in various languages and countries, I’d be unable to follow all of it.
So, my suggestion would be - be bold. Go and enable “follow 1st post” for tagging category and this site feedback. Translate that first post and see if it interest you, and if it does, track it and translate and read it. If you have something to add, just reply to it - feel free to write it in Korean if it is more comfortable than English for you, people will translate it from their side too. Sometimes it will not be very clear (that translations are not perfect), and people will ask for clarifications. Try to clarify as best as you can. And so, you will be the change that you want to see in the world.