[OSM-talk] Progress at Wikipedia
Lars Aronsson
lars at aronsson.se
Thu Aug 10 19:31:14 BST 2006
On Wikipedia, a short article about OpenStreetMap was created in
October 2005 and then significantly extended in January,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap
One month ago, on July 8, I created a Swedish version and then I
started to propagate the idea of translating it to more languages.
It was apparent to me that OSM has pretty good coverage of
England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway and
Sweden, but most other countries are almost blank. One way to
help it spread could be to have Wikipedia articles in each local
language. For me, the priority is to spread our North Sea
coverage to the Baltic Sea, i.e. Poland and neighboring countries.
In the navigation menu to the left of every Wikipedia article, you
can find "interwiki" links to corresponding articles in other
languages. So I started with English articles like "Motorway" and
"GPS" and went over to the Polish, Czech, and Russian versions.
I don't speak these languages, but the "history" tab is at the
same position in every language. From there I could get an idea
which users were writing articles about motorways, navigation and
road infrastructure. From their user pages I could conclude if
this was among their primary interests and whether they speak
English. In each language I could find two or three prospects.
On their user talk pages I wrote a short message, asking them to
help in translating the OpenStreetMap article to their language.
One example is the user talk page for the Estonian user Jaan513,
http://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasutaja_arutelu:Jaan513
I wrote that request on July 23 and on July 27 Jaan edited the
English original article to add the Estonian interwiki link there.
I have also added OSM screenshots of Tallinn, St Petersburg,
Bratislava, Prague, and Bucharest to the relevant articles.
Currently, the OpenStreetMap article has been translated (in full
or part) to Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, German, Romanian,
Russian, Slovak, and Swedish -- all in the last month. I also
have vague promises of translations to Polish and Serbian.
We still lack translations in French, Dutch and Norwegian.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
More information about the talk
mailing list