[OSM-talk] [Spam] Re: Alternatives to wikipedia?

[Peter Miller]

2009/3/18 Russ Nelson <russ at cloudmade.com>

>
> On Mar 18, 2009, at 4:53 AM, Lester Caine wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> This is a serious enough issue that it should be escalated to the
> OSMF.  They should make an arrangement with Wikipedia saying: that an
> article linked from OSM to Wikipedia is by definition noteworthy, and
> that that justification cannot be used to delete an article from
> Wikipedia.  There might be other reasons: for example that the
> locations linked between OSM and Wikipedia are in fact not related, or
> the *location* is not worth including in OSM.



With respect, there are good reasons for some articles to not make it into
Wikipedia. Certainly the process for removing them can be a little crude but
the notability criteria for Wikipedia are necessary. I had trouble with some
articles about minor ferry services in Suffolk (one did arguably have
notability as being the smallest registered ferry in Europe, however even
that was not enough for the group). They were deemed 'not-notable'
individually but I did get them to stick when someone suggested an article
'local ferries in Suffolk'. It would have been better to have had another
place to put them where that problem didn't arise but WIkipedia is not that
place really. Here is what we ended up with...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Ferries_in_Suffolk

It may be necessary for OSM to create a companion wiki for OSM where every
feature or relation (or group of features) can have an article and that
existence of a feature in OSM is criteria enough for inclusion but it would
need people who would maintain it and it would need to be linked into the
OSM tool base.

ITO would be very supportive of an initiative to provide descriptions,
photos and subjective information about features in the OSM database which
don't belong in OSM itself. The word 'smoothness' comes to mind! If anyone
is interested in this then possibly we should set up a wiki page for it:)


Regards,


Peter Miller
ITO World Ltd



>
>
> If we're going to cooperate with Wikipedia, then they need to
> cooperate with us by not allowing any dangling links.
>
> --
> Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog -
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
> russ at cloudmade.com - Twitter: Russ_OSM -
> http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20090318/c1f46dd9/attachment.html>