[OSM-talk] Improving community within the OSM site

Andy Robinson Andy_J_Robinson at blueyonder.co.uk
Tue May 23 15:18:11 BST 2006


I'm with your thoughts here Tom. Ideally the spatial aspect of OSM should
extend and expand from the root webpage across all areas rather than from
the separate wiki. The wiki has been excellent for bringing things together
and providing very up to date info and support for whats going on but as a
whole its going to become more and more fragmented and difficult to manage
as time and users grow.

I suspect the wiki will always have its place. As you say, static
documentation (time type rather than spatial type documents) is perhaps best
served by the current type of wiki format. The exciting challenge would be
to merge the fluidity of spatial information (and its change with time) in
the context of OSM itself.

I'd call it "node bubbles" or something equally insane ;-)

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 Tom Carden
>Sent: 23 May 2006 14:00
>To: Erik Johansson
>Cc: Talk Openstreetmap
>Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Improving community within the OSM site
>
>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.
>
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