[OSM-dev] The wiki defines the database (was: relations)

[Andy Allan]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 12:28 PM, Sascha Silbe
<sascha-ml-gis-osm-dev at silbe.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 05, 2008 at 11:57:07AM +0000, Andy Allan wrote:
>
>> [...], which
>> triggered a virulent campaign by the wiki-types to repeatedly delete
>> the information that I had put up, [...]
>
> Who exactly are "the wiki-types" you mention?

I don't want to make it personal or pick out individuals. It's pretty
plain from the wiki-history who was doing what in the particular case
I was referring to - but the point is way more general than just my
one little illustration which is why I haven't even linked to it.

> IMO there shouldn't be "the wiki-types" and "the mappers", those should be
> one and the same. Without defining what tags (=syntax) mean (=semantic),
> it's hard to use them properly.

I agree with both your statements.

> From reading the discussions regularly popping up on the mailing lists, I'm
> getting the impression there's a minority on the wiki disturbing the work of
> others. That's vandalism to me, nothing more and nothing less.

I wouldn't necessarily say it's a minority on the wiki, and that's one
of the problems. It's a fairly large group of people now, probably
outnumbering all the people who write editors, rendering software, and
other stuff combined. It's a function of groupthink - people on the
wiki see the way the wiki-fiddlers work and accept it as the norm.
Battle-scarred veterans who have tried to straighten things out spend
their time working elsewhere - by their very nature. How could the
author of an OSM editor or renderer out-wiki a group of dedicated
wiki-fiddlers? We have other stuff that simply doesn't get done if we
aren't doing it.

And for vandalism I would simply say (deeply) misguided - I don't
think anyone appreciates their hard work being called vandalism,
misguided or not.

> So what about trying to get this minority to stop impeding our work, instead
> of splitting ourselves into "the wiki-types" (those defining the semantics)
> and "the mappers" (those using the syntax to enter data into the database)?

As they say, "Good luck with that".

> Of course there are other ways of communicating the semantics of the tags
> you use (e.g. mailing lists), but the wiki is currently the best we have in
> terms of successful information retrieval.

Absolutely. I've occasionally flirted with other ideas - bits on the
opencyclemap.org website that are under strict editorial control, for
example, documenting how things actually work and safe from uninformed
opinions. But that is firstly time I could spend making the cycle map
even better, and also not really in the spirit of community building.
I'd rather that I could document stuff on the OSM wiki, but I've been
there before and it wasn't a pleasant experience.

Cheers,
Andy