[OSM-talk] OSM Wikibase is now live

Christoph Hormann osm at imagico.de
Sun Sep 23 15:07:35 UTC 2018


On Sunday 23 September 2018, Tobias Knerr wrote:
>
> > I suspect that the attempts for more structured metadata won't be
> > really accepted by the community (the editors of the wiki).
>
> As one of the more active editors of the wiki, I'm very hopeful for
> this project. The current "solution" for this kind of data is to
> manually copy templates across several pages. This is a massive pain
> point and leads to pages unintentionally getting out of sync all the
> time.

For clarification:  The main purpose of the OSM wiki is to allow mappers 
to document tags they use and allow them to coordinate and communicate 
about this use of tags with other mappers.  If you have some data 
collecting application related to OSM tags it would be advisable to 
maintain this outside the OSM wiki - like for example taginfo and 
taghistory do.

Mixing systematic data collection into the OSM wiki is just asking for 
trouble.  The OSM wiki is not Wikipedia.  It is also not a playground 
for wiki curators who want to manage it as a standalone project 
describing their ideas on how OSM should look like, it is meant to be 
used by mappers to describe what OSM actually looks like (which often 
happens to be unstructured and non-systematic).

We already have quite a few people on the wiki who try to forbid mappers 
accurately documenting widely used tags because these tags are bad in 
terms of certain systematics and should not exist.  If you'd now impose 
technical constraints preventing mappers from documenting things that 
do not match a certain ideal of structure would you would effectively 
make the wiki unsuitable for its primary application and mappers would 
need to set up a new place to document their tags.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/



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