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

[Peter Miller]

On 18 Mar 2009, at 17:11, Lester Caine wrote:

> Tim 'avatar' Bartel wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> 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?

As I see it there are a number of different sorts of 'associated' data  
for OSM that needs a reliable and welcoming home somewhere:

1) Photos - these need to have locations and a direction or  
alternatively two positions, one for the camera and one for the  
subject of the photo. In addition to that it is useful to know when it  
was taken and any special attributes, was it taken when it was  
snowing, was it raining, is it a picture of something pretty or of a  
defect or of a signpost or what. All of this information would allow  
applications to decide which ones to use. A journey planner would show  
pictures of the pretty things on the route but another application  
might want to show defects to the local council or show illegal  
parking to the police. So... there is a whole load of stuff to do with  
photos , some pretty pictures of scenery can go in WikiTravel and  
Viovio etc, but some of the other stuff wouldn't be appreciated there  
and we might need to provide a home.

2) Articles - background information for a street, when it was  
constructed, why, where its name came from and possibly plans for its  
future. Hard to see who else would give this house-room.

3) Subjective information about ways - muddy in winter, poor lighting,  
too narrow for a double buggy, very crowded on market days etc.

I would like us to think about all this stuff. We need to decide which  
bit below in Wikipedia (certainly the right place for articles about  
towns), for Viovio (pretty pictures?), and which nerdy details about  
traffic, pot poles, traffic signs and bus stop poles and origins of  
street names belong in OSM and no-where else.

Finally, lets not be frightened about the cost of another box and the  
hosting because terrabytes and gigabytes are really cheap these days.  
We have just bought a box with 7 Terrabytes of disk storage and it  
cost <£100 per terrabyte. We are also about to import all 1,000,000 of  
photos of geographic features in the UK  from Geograph (all CCBYSA) to  
see how it copes.

Can I suggest that if we are serious about this that we get a wiki  
page together with the brief for the project and see what it looks  
like as we work on it. Does this project have a name and are in vague  
agreement about the scope and the need?


Regards,


Peter


>
>
> -- 
> Lester Caine - G8HFL
> -----------------------------
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