[OSM-talk] Organisation of Wiki pages

[Andy Robinson]

Personally I'd prefer to see the wiki principally used for the development
side and information with a separate route from the home portal to view
locations and finished mapping. In my opinion we shouldn't really require
people to find output within the wiki in the longer term.

I could envisage that any search name entered into the search box on the
homepage would produce more than just the name tags or "city" viewer link
but could also produce a link(s) to rendered map(s) of the place. The main
alternative approach would presumably see these final renderings placed on
wikipedia rather than on OSM at all, but that's not necessarily easy for
everyone. Anyone rendering a map should be able to make it accessible really
easily, especially as new and imaginative map output comes along. These are
more akin to geotaged images rather than necessarily traditionally rendered
maps of a village, town, city etc. so these probably don't fit with either
OSM or wikipedia hosting. I guess at that point we can probably say the
project has been a complete success because it will mean that output moves
away from OSM itself. Perhaps we would be thinking about another sister
project that deals with the geotagged images and mapping output even now.

Having said all that I do think it would be logical to have someone take a
look at the overall current structure of the wiki and to suggest a template
basis that cleans the organisation of it up a bit.

Cheers

Andy

Andy Robinson
Andy_J_Robinson at blueyonder.co.uk 

>-----Original Message-----
>From: talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org [mailto:talk-
>bounces at openstreetmap.org] On Behalf Of Etienne
>Sent: 25 August 2006 1:29 PM
>To: Talk Openstreetmap
>Subject: [OSM-talk] Organisation of Wiki pages
>
>Currently there are two kinds of pages on the Wiki; WikiProject pages
>(example:
>http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/WikiProject_United_Kingdom ) which
>relate to an area and track progress usually using a table or list of
>places.  And place pages which are specific to a city/town/village and
>contain one or more rendered versions of that place (example:
>http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Walton_on_Thames
><http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Walton_on_Thames> ).
>
>There are some pages, such as
>http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Isle_of_Wight which are a mixture
>of the two.
>
>It seems like it might be time to start thinking about making a clearer
>demarkation between project pages and finished place pages.  The place
>pages will ultimately form a gallery of rendered images of places of
>interest and would be the pages most likely viewed by a casual visitor to
>the site.  The project pages would be the location of planning and progress
>tracking and be used mainly by participating users of OSM.
>
>Does anyone think this is a good idea, or have any better or alternative
>ideas?
>
>Should we even be using the wiki as a gallery of places?  When I posted the
>first osmarender images I did that mainly as examples, not really as a
>method of publishing them.  I wasn't expecting the wiki to end up with a
>rendered image of every village on the planet.  Right now, though, it is
>the only way that a casual visitor to the site will see anything that
>really shows off the results we've achived (and the wiki is a lot faster
>than the main site so the brosing experience is much better).
>
>What do people think?
>
>Etienne
>