[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




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