[OSM-talk] Alternatives to wikipedia?

[Lester Caine]

Tim 'avatar' Bartel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 2009/3/18 Russ Nelson <russ at cloudmade.com>:
>> On Mar 18, 2009, at 4:53 AM, Lester Caine wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> If we're going to cooperate with Wikipedia, then they need to
>> cooperate with us by not allowing any dangling links.
> 
> There are several reasons why this isn't possible, but the biggest one
> is the following: Wikipedia isn't controlled by the Wikimedia
> Foundation but by the community. With whom do you like to make an
> arrangement? It's pretty hard to make an arrangement with a community
> consisting out of constantly changing people.

That is probably the main reason who I would prefer to find an 
alternative 'location' to direct links to. And some useful suggestions 
have already been made.

While I CAN appreciate the idea of our own wiki. That would require a 
lot more hardware. Viovio has several terabytes of images already, and I 
suspect wikitravel.org can probably top that. So sharing the load would 
sound a lot more sensible?

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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