[OSM-talk] Organisation of Wiki pages

[Etienne]

On 8/25/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>
> Etienne wrote:
>
> > At the moment, the user experience via the wiki is significantly
> > better than via the main slippy map.
>
> An interesting study!  But a dimension you didn't study is
> researching the many, many thousand different names that can be
> searched and found via the slippy map and that I hope will never
> have their own pages on the OSM wiki (our wiki would easily become
> ten times bigger than Wikipedia).


In the long term I totally agree.   But right now the slippy map takes 8
minutes to show anything useful.  That's not acceptable.

We already know that the slippy
> map is slow (and unreliable: it doesn't always draw the roads that
> it should), but this is because it is a piece of crappy software
> written by a few programmers with all the wrong focus (pretty
> soon, Steve will call me a troll again).  This can be fixed, but
> not by switching to uploading static map images to a wiki.  We
> have already seen prototypes of better implementations, based on
> Shapefiles and Mapserver.


So how long do we wait for these improvements?

With almost zero effort we can improve the experience of the casual visitor
from an 8 minute wait to a result within 15 seconds.  The slippy map is
great, but these days users expect at least the same as Google maps - if
this was my first visit to OSM and it took me 8 minutes to get to Oxford I
would have given up and moved on long before I saw anything interesting.

When the slippy map can deliver any place on the planet within 15 seconds
then it will be a better solution than the wiki.  While the number of
interesting places is less than a few hundred the wiki is a much better
solution and can easily cope with that.

We have seen prototypes of better solutions, but they are *only* prototypes
and even if they are good solutions the OSM servers may not yet have the
horsepower to give the user a decent response.

Lars, I know that you have contributed enormously to the OSM project, but I
have never, ever, seen the result of anything that you have done.   I just
tried to find something you'd done.  It took almost 5 minutes and all I
found was a small village called Askersund.  I found this by picking names
at random from the diary on your Wiki User page and then using the search
feature of the slippy map - most places, like Björsäter, used Swedish
characters and returned no results - but the Wiki *is* able to handle names
like this.

According to the stats, there are currently about 10 new users *every* day
who get as far as creating an account.  For every one of these there must be
another 10 visitors who look but don't register.  I'd guess that most of
these give up looking within about one or two minutes - long before they see
anything interesting.  Most would give up because all they can see is a
blank map.  You have to zoom in at least 10 times before any segments show
up.  How many would think to click on Help and Wiki - which is where all the
good stuff is at the moment?

Does anyone have access to the web-server stats?  An analysis of number of
visitors, what pages they get to, and how long they stay around, would be
very useful to get an idea of what happens to our visitors.

$0.02
Etienne



--
>   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
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