[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 being out of date and at least in a legal grey zone if not already out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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