[OSM-talk] Ideas for OSM enhancements

[Laurence Penney]

Nick Whitelegg wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> A couple of ideas for enhancements on the OSM site - what do people 
> think? If people think they're good ideas I'll try and find time to hack 
> on them, though the next month might be a bit difficult.
> 
> One would be to do something similar to what I already do on Freemap, 
> namely clickable POIs: The user could click on a POI then get a window 
> containing a link to its Wikipedia article (if applicable) and its 
> description tag (if it has one).

Nice idea, but...

I'd very much like to allow pop-up info windows on OSM for POIs that 
are not Wikipedia articles - that's "not" as in "not yet" and "never 
likely to be".

I created a Wikipedia article for Montagu Square[1] in London a few 
months ago, for the simple reason that I wanted to tag a photo with 
its Wikipedia URL. It's not a very interesting square, and the article 
was repeatedly nominated for speedy deletion by a 'pedian citing the 
notability criterion[2]. After tedious wrangles and the addition of a 
quote from Summerson, the page survives.

But communities everywhere should have the ability to write in a 
Wikipedia style about their own localities without such wrangles.

I'd very much like to see a site devoted to connecting OSM point and 
way IDs with wiki texts. Is there wider support for this idea? If I 
set one up, will anyone use it?

(One issue is that OSM IDs are not necessarily persistent. If someone 
cleans up an area, the IDs are possibly different from before.)

If OSM IDs really aren't suitable, then a site using POI names, naming 
in a Wikipedia style, would still be very useful for similar stuff.

-- L

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montagu_Square
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability 
http://ragesossscholar.blogspot.com/2007/03/wikipedia-and-notability.html