[OSM-talk] Alternatives to wikipedia?

[Lester Caine]

While the effort being put into links WITH wikipedia are to be 
applauded, many of us are no longer contributing to wikipedia because of 
their propensity to kill of material that is not 'noteworthy'!

On a number of occasions in the past I have linked to articles only 
later to find the 'censors' message at the end of a link :( and I know 
we have had this discussion in the past where other OSM contributors 
have found the same problem.

The bottom line in my mind is that if we applied the same heavy handed 
rubber to OSM that is applied in wikipedia then many people whould have 
walked from here.

All I am probably asking at this point is that links FROM OSM to an 
article should bear some what when an 'editor' gets it into his head 
that the article should be chopped. But that can only be ensured by 
pressure inside wikipedia, and some flag that osm IS linking to it?

In the meantime, the bulk of the links WE need to create at this time 
are to secondary place information, and there are lots of alternative - 
more open - places that we can link to.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html
      Freely usable up to date facts ...
http://www.geonames.org/ - Only really useful as a cross reference?
      OSM search usually gets the location right, but a link back to
      source search would be useful?
http://www.infoplease.com/atlas/ - ( with advertising :( )
http://wikitravel.org    - Growing library of local information
http://www.viovio.com/travel/ - Growing photo gallery
      ( This site would benefit from replacing MapQuest by OSM ;) )
http://www.flickr.com/places/ Pictures via place name - roughly

Of cause what would be nice would be a common standard for location 
names, so we can just create new links automatically. I keep returning 
to a nice hierarchic front end for osm, which nowadays is probably just 
a different view on the place search?

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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