[OSM-talk] Things People Say

[Toby Murray]

On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 3:39 PM, Ben Johnson <tangararama at gmail.com> wrote:
> You don't hear Wikipedia trumpeting "we are not an encyclopedia, we are a
> database of information." No... they scream from the mountain tops "we are
> the world's encyclopedia", and absolutely relish in it.
>
> Why can't OSM be also scream from
> a nearby mountain top, "we are the world's map".... I mean, what's so
> embarrassing about providing a good, comprehensive, accessible map? It's an
> accomplishment of which we should all be proud, not hide away.

I present:

The redesigned OSM home page:
http://i.imgur.com/stvfZ.png

I'm not really saying this is good or bad but I believe OSMF currently
does not have any interest in becoming a multi-million dollar
operation with hundreds of tile servers on multiple gigabit internet
links. And it seems like there are enough people opposed to this idea
that it is not likely to happen.

I do think there is a non-trivial technical difference between OSM and
wikipedia. The text of a given wikipedia article is 90% of the value.
It can be displayed as-is and still be useful. Making it pretty and
user-friendly is relatively trivial with some CSS or whatever.

Our map data is completely different. It is absolutely useless to most
people without a rendering process which is much more complicated than
formatting some HTML. There are color schemes, rendering choices,
de-clutterification, regional cartographic conventions, etc, etc.
Which is why we leave it up to other people to do this since they can
make what they need out of our data.

Toby