Quite often you can read a reference to newbies in discussions of almost every aspect of OSM project. Someone could use that reference to say, that something is too complicated. For example - certain tagging scheme. In other cases, it is used to motivate someone, like, “you’d better translate that Wiki page, otherwise, newbies will not understand …”

Actually, only a few references like that making any sense. Usually, it’s nothing more than demagogic method to convince others. And here is why.

For example, in marketing people conducting studies, tests, using focus groups and panels to learn about target group of certain product, service or public statement. Even after that, they are not completely sure about results. And here goes John Smith, who indirectly claims, that he knows how OSM newbies think and so on, when he refers to them. No, he knows almost nothing.

There are only a few statistical studies, showing basically only one thing: spread of amount of edits (statistical or geographical). But there is no studies of behavior. I completely understand, that it’s really hard to conduct a study like that, I don’t even claim that I know how to do that. But what I’m trying to say, is that referring to newbies does not make much sense without it. Intuitive “knowledge” is not a knowledge at all.

Indeed, some people (only a few of OSM contributors, actually) have certain experience with newbies because they organized mapping parties or workshops. But is that empirical knowledge universal? Most likely, no.

For example, HOT volunteers have different motivation from people, who want to improve/fix map for their navigation device.Those who want to “help everybody at any cost” (importers of illegal data) have completely different motivation too. Lack of skill of reading in English or German also changes the situation, and if combined with overestimation of this skill, makes a disaster for translations.

Digging through these cases, it’s easy to conclude, that only a fraction of issues, usually attributed to newbies, are actually linked exclusively to them. There is another term - amateur (in negative meaning, like, “one, who knows not enough to do certain job well and who doesn’t really want to learn”), which describes the source of real recurrent issues, because it’s quite hard to convince experienced amateur to change his attitude and a manner of work.

Obviously, newbies have to learn to make usable contributions. And it will eventually turn them into confident mappers, who understand own level of competency. In general, being regular people, they don’t need any special treatment like if they were people with special needs. While many references to newbies include something, that renders them as extremely shy individuals. Likely, in cases like HOT projects, it makes some sense, because motivation of helping developing countries could attract those who are barely computer-literate, while self-motivated geeks in the rest of OSM are of different kind. But the whole OSM project is not equal to HOT and is not a subordinate of it. So, treatment should probably be different.

My claim is that currently Newbie is a mythical creature, that serves for rhetorical (demagogic) purposes. Its imaginary character is ridiculous: shy, illiterate, clumsy, stupid, incapable to learn, emotionally unstable and fragile, aggressive, ignorant, but in the same time - precious and very important for further OSM improvement and development. These epithets are not my fantasy - I took it from different statements, where reference to newbies was used for reasoning. Telling about it, I want to call for an active skepticism towards any statement like that.