[OSM-dev] Wiki needs work (was: Translation of the Main Page?)

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> An insecure/nervous/inexperienced programmer tends to define 
> dozens of classes or functions, none of which does anything much, 
> and most of which should benefit from being removed/merged in the 
> next refactoring.  On the wiki we see a tendency to create many 
> pages, each containing 2 or 3 sentences.  

I second that. In addition to that, the wiki contains a lot of things 
that are simply wrong (out of date), but since the whole project is so 
complex, it is often difficult to fix it without asking around, and 
difficult to know whom you should ask.

Also, many people, myself included, tend to operate the Wiki in 
write-once mode - I do something, I put a page on the Wiki so that it 
doesn't get lost, and then I move on and forget about it.

(Good example: Somewhere on the Osmarender page there's still 
information I put in about the "Inkscape Baseline Bug" and how to fix it 
by creating your own font. This is fixed by a much better Osmarender 
workaround in the mean time, but I didn't remove that bit then, so that 
people reading through the Wiki to understand what's going on have no 
chance to know that... ok I'll remove it now.)

Another tendency is to use the Wiki like the Americans tend use their 
land - never tear down anything old, instead build shiny stuff next to 
it as there's always enough space ;-)

The wiki could really use somebody to clean up, throw away the stuff 
from years ago, or at least remove anything that is misleading or plain 
wrong. A team of editors if you will. We'll have to wait for them to 
show up ;-)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'