[OSM-talk] Being more like Wikipedia (was: OpenStreetMap Future Look)

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 01/09/13 13:26, Paweł Paprota wrote:
> Projects like OSM do not run on fairy dust and rainbows. Yesterday I
> watched Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) on The Colbert Report talk
> show and he was talking about Wikipedia's strategy and budget. They
> spend nearly 30 million dollars a year on hardware, network, manpower
> (technical, administrative) just to keep Wikipedia running. Of course it
> is not nearly the same scale as OSM but the same principle starts to
> apply to OSM as I hope everyone wants OSM to be more like Wikipedia in
> terms of users and being well-known.

I'm very much an outsider to Wikimedia but if I look at how much money 
they have spent on development and how little has changed for the 
contributing user - adding a table to an article is practically as 
difficult now as it was five years ago. You sit there and wonder: How 
hard can it be? Hundreds of man-years of developer time... and still a 
person with average computer literacy cannot add a table to an article!

I have the highest respect for Wikipedia and what the movement has 
achieved, but if you are looking for proof that big money can actually 
be translated into direct ease of use for contributors, then you should 
really look elsewhere. If we embrace the Wikipedia model and achieve the 
same efficiency with regard to user interface advances, then iD will 
launch in 2016 and your history tab in 2018.

It is too simplistic, to say things like "everyone wants OSM to be more 
like Wikipedia in terms of <X>", because you can't always separate the 
good from the bad. It's easy to say "I'd like to have the kind of money 
that Wikimedia have" or "the popularity that Wikipedia enjoys" but none 
of this can be had without a downside.

For example, Wikipedia being as well known as it is has lead them to 
create "relevance criteria" - you can't create an article on a living 
person or a geographic feature, for example, unless that person or 
feature fulfills certain criteria. Wikipedians felt that this was 
necessary because they were swamped with data they considered irrelevant 
and un-encyclopedic. Many people left Wikipedia because of that (and 
indeed many of them are to be found in the ranks of OSM nowadays). I've 
heard other OSMers make fun of the tons of "WP:xxx" rules that Wikipedia 
has but I am sure they are not there because Wikipedians terribly enjoy 
rule-making - they probably had to be created in response to problems.

Same with money - an organisation that deals with a multi-million budget 
will automatically have a much higher overhead (recent Wikimedia 
fundraising has been criticized because they made it sound like your 
donation was for servers when in fact only 10% if it went to 
infrastructure or so) and there will be more fighting over who gets how 
much of the cake. If you believe that we're currently having heated 
discussions, imagine how such discussions would go if they were about 
the allocation of millions ;)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"