[OSM-talk] Wikipedia POI import?

[Russ Nelson]

On May 5, 2009, at 3:23 PM, Tobias Knerr wrote:

> Russ Nelson schrieb:
>> Any reason not to go through Wikipedia and import everything with a
>> coordinate as a POI, with a url=http://wikipedia.org/NAME link, and
>> name=NAME where NAME is the name of the Wikipedia entry?
>
> * There is already a free, constantly-updated, machine-readable and,
> most importantly, authoritative source of "Wikipedia entry location"
> information available: Wikipedia itself.


Argh.  Okay, so here's the problem as I see it:

1) We encourage people to add features to OSM.  Specifically I'm  
thinking of public art like the Charging Bull aka the Wall Street  
Bull.  It's in OSM as tourism=artwork.
2) But it's also in Wikipedia.
3) We could not import it.  But then, by dribs and by drabs, over  
time, people will re-create all of Wikipedia's (and in fact EVERY  
other bit of geodata) entries, because when they look at the editor,  
it's not there.

There's two ways we could go:   either import EVERYTHING into OSM.  Or  
else make sure that everything which map renderers could use is also  
available to OSM editors.  One way to do that is to have a second API  
which consists of a cached copy of everything that map renderers might  
use, all merged into one read-only OSM-compatible api.  So when  
somebody asks to edit an area, the editor also shows them the read- 
only elements, so they know not to enter anything already available to  
map users.

Especially Wikipedia, which is already editable in a different  
format.  Maybe what we really need is a gateway to editing Wikipedia  
using OSM as a front-end?

--
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