[OSM-talk] Map Features usefulness, usability and maintainability

[Andrew Hain]

The Map Features page is a long standing page on the wiki linked from its
left sidebar and it has been translated into a large number of languages.

Unfortunately there are clear signs of difficulties of maintenance. Tags are
regularly added with the wrong wiki variable copied and pasted that makes
the description for a tag wrong in languages other than English until
someone notices. Versions of the page in some languages have message boxes
saying that parts of the page are out of date because page authors didn’t
follow the intended structure. There is no way to link from the main columns
to tag documentation that is newly created in the current language without
updating the link manually; trying to do so from tag descriptions has had
awkward side effects. Currently the page is not fully rendered in three
languages with a fourth that is only complete because one of the templates
has been removed.

It may be practical to sit down and strip back some of the accumulation of
edits by a large number of different people that have added up to where we
are now or to take on board new wiki technologies such as Lua scripting. But
before we do that I think it’s worthwhile to think about what we actually
need: whether the page should look the way it does, whether it belongs on
the wiki, how we can keep it up to date and indeed whether other sources of
documentation are actually more useful.

--
Andrew