[OSM-talk] Ideas for OSM enhancements

[Lester Caine]

milenko at king-nerd.com wrote:
> 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.

> Nick Whitelegg wrote:
> 
> 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.

The main problem on wikipedia is the arrogance of some of the so called editors.
Chipping Campden a local 'notable' local landmark is currently flagged
"This article does not cite any references or sources. (July 2007)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. 
Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed."
And a number of the other landmarks in the area have already been removed.

Personally I had been following ALL the rules in wikipedia in order to fill in 
the gaps, but every key item has been killed - with the attitude that if it is 
as notable as existing cross references that I was referring to then THEY 
should also be removed. I feel that wikipedia is simply not worth our support 
until they change their attitude to information!

http://www.wikinfo.org has been created as an alternative, and it is now 
recommended that pages are created on BOTH sites, then when wikipedia cull 
something there is still an available version :) I get the feeling from other 
lists that people are getting fed up writing articles for wikipedia only to 
have them 'fast deleted' !

Another site I've mentioned before is http://www.viovio.com/travel/
This has a world wide dictionary of places and also provides a place to store 
images that can be linked to those locations. Yes it's linked to a commercial 
site, but that does fund the running costs ;) And I don't think there would be 
any problem getting links back to OSM added to the page tags, and extending 
the information contained is another communal project.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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