[OSM-talk] Things People Say

Dirk-Lüder Kreie osm-list at deelkar.net
Fri Dec 30 13:23:30 GMT 2011


On 12/30/11 00:50, Toby Murray wrote:
> 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.

Even more importantly it's quite easy to convert a wikipedia article to
some sort of plain text as a basis for an entirely different
encyclopedia, even without access to the source text version of the
page. For Maps this is even harder to get from a pixel image back to
some meaningful vector data.


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