[OSM-talk] Organisation of Wiki pages

[Andy Robinson]

Excellent review Etienne. Puts the situation precisely in perspective. Of
course Steve will say wait for Rails it will be a lot better but I think a
regular benchmark such as this is important to ensure the rest of us work
towards improving what we can outside of the slippy interface.

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 4:12 PM
>To: Nicola Ranaldo
>Cc: talk at openstreetmap.org
>Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Organisation of Wiki pages
>
>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
>