[OSM-talk] Improving community within the OSM site

[Tom Carden]

On 23/05/06, Erik Johansson <erjohan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/23/06, Tom Carden <tom at tom-carden.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > I don't think mediawiki is good enough to support collaboration on
> > OpenStreetMap in the long term, and I think that tying them together
> > in the short term would just be setting us up for a fall.
>
> Could you expand on what features you think will be the fall of mediawiki?
>

Sure.  There are lots, and I'm sure mediawiki is capable of being
customised to handle some of it, but other things require a custom
solution.

Firstly, note that I am in awe of some of the things people are doing
with OSM right now, and that I'm aware that much of it has been
organised on the wiki.  Keep going, it's brilliant, and I'm not here
to belittle that in the slightest.  I'm just thinking a year or two
ahead, to supporting 20000 users instead of 2000, across the globe and
not just mainly in Europe, etc.

Things that mean mediawiki isn't suited to managing discussion of maps:

It's not a map, pages don't have location in space.

I think that discussion of map /areas/ should go alongside the map
itself, be organic, and be able to overlap in time and space (woo).

I think that discussions should be able to cover arbitrary areas (e.g.
Isle of Wight but not Portsmouth, coastlines but not countryside, post
offices but not banks, etc.)

I'd like to be able to search for discussions within x km of a given location.

I live in Holloway, Islington, North London, alongside the Piccadilly
Line, in N7, near the University of North London, along Holloway Road,
along the A1, in London, within the M25, in Greater London, in the
Southeast, in England, in the UK, in Europe, etc etc (... galaxy, ...
universe ... zzzz...)
 - I should be able to browse to that place on the map and see
"discussions near here" for any given scale and time-frame.
Discussions should probably have importance so that "is this road
still one-way" doesn't bother people looking at a whole country.

People are already having trouble deciding what constitutes "London"
for the purposes of organising a local group.

Last but not least, the mediawiki codebase is regarded by many
contributors to this project as a hellish untameable beast, the likes
of which we don't want to start hacking in alongside a ruby map
front-end.

I might be in favour of using Mediawiki as a back-end to lots of the
features I'm interested in, but not the version that's on
wiki.openstreetmap.org because that should be for documentation,
events, etc.

Tom.