[OSM-talk] Ideas for OSM enhancements

[milenko at king-nerd.com]

I wondered about this when the topic first popped up.  I've heard of many articles being removed from Wikipedia because they were not deemed significant enough to be part of the site.

I'd think that if we're going to do popups of this nature (and I think it's a great idea), that the information needs to be under osm control to prevent issues with conflicting ideas on what's important and what's not.  A link to a wiki seems like a good fit to me, as long as the wiki is devoted to the purpose of additional info on points on a map (osmplaces.org maybe?).

Maybe a point can be created and tagged with some kind of new key, "moreinfo" or something like that.  The value for the key could be a URL, that way it could point to the "official" osm wiki, or if wikipedia has an article on that item the URL could point there.  

Could the slippy map look for a tag like that and display the link?

Another method could be a special osm wiki that returns info that's easily formatted for a sidebar that could open on the slippy map when one of these tags is clicked.  Some kind of RSS-like feed maybe?  I don't know if there's any wiki software with some kind of plugin that could be used "out of the box?"

I'd love to help out with a project like this, once there's a general consensus on how it's supposed to work.

-Jeremy

Original Message -----------------------
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


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