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

[Lester Caine]

Peter Miller wrote:
> 
> 
> 2009/3/18 Russ Nelson <russ at cloudmade.com <mailto: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

I'd have a little more sympathy with wikipedia if they did not slap 
large banners over many articles and then not ACTUALLY do anything about 
them for 18 months ...
The person how decided to complain should be required to back up a 
complaint within a reasonable time, or the banners simply get taken off. 
A lot of the potential links I WAS making in 2007 still have the same 
garbage plastered over them and none of the points of clarification I 
posted at the time have ever been answered :(

> 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:)

I have to admit to a side line interest in viovio and I will be looking 
at switching the mapping links to use osm, but while 'researching' this 
email, http://wikitravel.org came up and seems to provide a very nice 
base that we could dovetail with nicely!

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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