[OSM-dev] The wiki defines the database

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

jim at cloudmade.com wrote:
> The genius of a good crowd sourced project (and OSM is very good) is 
> that the data being sourced AND the encoding model itself are BOTH crowd 
> sourced.

It is true that not every crowd-sourced project has this; some just have 
a fixed structure and expect contributors to fill that in.

There's no clear line between the two however; you can start out with a 
free-for-all crowdsourced project and then at first have informal rules, 
then watch these become more formal, with the organisation drifting from 
a do-ocratic to a democratic structure, up to a point where the 
structure is really fixed and the crowdsourcing process limited to the data.

(Of course the structure is not fixed as in "cannot be changed", but it 
is just as fixed as a structure given by an organisation, such as Google 
with their map maker - this can change to, and might even change in 
response to user requests, but still it is fixed as opposed to 
crowdsourced.)

Out of interest, I'd like to know where Wikipedia currently is on that 
scale, and what their internal discussions about this are like. As a 
Wikipedia user I see that many articles are drifting towards a fixed 
structure, for example; can I still create articles that don't use the 
structure or will there immediately be a flurry of people telling me 
what I did wrong, where I did not adhere to rules, and how things should 
be done differently because this has been decided then-and-then by 
so-and-so?

The interesting question is, can you sustainably uphold the 
crowdsourcing principle on both fronts, or will you sooner or later gave 
to give in to calls for democratic structures, votes, elections and so 
on because it is the least evil?

I tend to think that wherever you have to mediate between conflicting 
interests you will (at some point) just give up and implement democracy. 
("Can't agree? But of course we need to all do it the same way. Ok let's 
vote and whoever loses has to do what the winners say.") Many, many 
people in OSM believe that this cannot be avoided and that we might as 
well do democracy right away. Many also seem to be unwilling or unable 
to question whether democracy is really best for everything.

However, I have the hope that we might just manage to *avoid* 
conflicting interests altogether, or at least to a very large degree, by 
being "all things to all people". If we manage to keep the database open 
for as many things, ideas, and concepts as possible, then instead of 
fighting (or voting) over the right ("one true") way to arrange things 
in the data base, people could just extract those things they want in 
the form they want them. The same could be done, and is done, in other 
areas in the project: Don't like the editor? Use another; don't like the 
map? Make one yourself, etc. - Still there are areas where we're more 
centralistic than necessary, leading to discussions about the "one true 
way", but wherever we can get out of that and say "have it both ways", 
that's a victory for freedom in my opinion.

The belief that there can only be "one true way" causes a lot of grief 
on many levels around the world. I'm sure there really are areas where 
you have to do something one way or another. But until now, OSM has 
worked quite well without having "one true way".

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"