[OSM-talk] Problems with the wiki (was "Why OSM and not another collaborative mapping service?")
SomeoneElse
lists at atownsend.org.uk
Thu May 7 11:49:40 UTC 2015
On 07/05/2015 12:03, Simon Poole wrote:
> I'm really not sure what this discussion is doing on tagging and have
> redirected follow ups to talk (it has in the matter of a few mails
> already gone substantially off-topic though).
>
> The page in question is actually a fork of
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Map_Maker which was written as
> a response to the introduction of MM.
>
> I personally consider it dangerous to base such a comparison on anything
> but general principles. On the one hand you are always in danger of
> being out of date and at least in a legal grey zone if not already out
> side of it, on the other hand it tends to degenerate in to
> political/point of view material, are all commercial companies actually
> evil as Xxzme version seems to imply?
>
This page is an excellent example of what can go wrong with the OSM
wiki. It's a personal POV page, written by a user with views that are,
shall we say, not shared by all, and who seems to have "issues" with any
form of collaboration (a temporary wiki ban was used before to address
some previous issues).
Where the wiki works well it's a collaborative documentation of "How We
Map"*. It does contain some effective opinion pieces (e.g.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Duck_tagging&oldid=603101 )**
, but they are clearly labelled as such and don't attempt to misdocument
how people in OSM map things.
If "random" edits like this are allowed to continue*** it'll devalue the
wiki even more as a resource. I'm not a wiki admin, but I'm sure that
those who are are well aware of this problem and I would hope they are
already considering what to do here.
Cheers,
Andy
PS: Although I'm a member of the DWG, this was written in an entirely
personal capacity as an ordinary mapper who tries to use the wiki for
documentation.
* incidentally that's another page that has had this user happen to it:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=How_We_Map&action=history
** yes, and that's another one:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Duck_tagging&action=history
*** https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Xxzme
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