[OSM-talk] Organisation of Wiki pages

[Etienne]

On 8/25/06, Nicola Ranaldo <ranaldo at unina.it> wrote:
>
> > 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?
>
> I like the wiki/collaborative approach, but at the same time i think the
> *generic/casual user* is confused by the lot of redoundant links
> and "gerarchy anarchy" coming from it. If the most clicked link is "recent
> changes" it's easy to say actually the site is a developer/hackers party
> and
> not a "portal" :)) I repeat, i like it as is now but if you think osm has
> to
> be opened to not skilled users somethinks should be revisited (and not
> only
> the wiki!).

About the images, in the future the online-applet and the tiles should
> become
> quite rich of features and have a fine look,


But right now it is not a good experience for a casual visitor.  We have a
lot of good stuff on the wiki and with a bit more high level structure could
be made quite interesting and friendly to casual visitors - at the moment
these include our potential new volunteers, the press and people who
actually want to see a map of Bedford or wherever.

Can the wiki cope with a large number of images?  How much disk space and
bandwidth do we have?


so there will be no need for all
> these raster images to show what you can do with osm data.
> Of course there will be pages and links showing what you can do
> with "external" software, but the number of images will be limited to show
> only some examples.


I just did a little experiment.  I tried to view Oxford using four different
methods.  In each case I started at www.openstreetmap.org.

1) Drill down using the slippy map.  This required 11 mouse clicks and took
8 minutes 36 seconds before I saw any roads.

2) Using the seach page.  This required 3 clicks and took 36 seconds.

3) Via the wiki and using the shortest linked path (Wiki->Community
Forum->WikiProject United Kingdom->Oxford).   This required 4 clicks and
took 15 seconds.

4) Via the wiki using the search option.  This required 2 clicks and took 17
seconds.

At the moment, the user experience via the wiki is significantly better than
via the main slippy map.  I agree that when the slippy map is good enough
and fast enough then that should be the preferred option, but until then I
think we would be giving casual users a better experience, and showing off
better what we have done, if we just directed everyone straight to the wiki.

 Etienne
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