[OSM-talk] OSM Wikibase is now live

Christoph Hormann osm at imagico.de
Sun Sep 23 22:32:18 UTC 2018


On Sunday 23 September 2018, Tobias Knerr wrote:
> On 23.09.2018 17:07, Christoph Hormann wrote:
> > 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.
>
> The content stored in Wikibase is editable by wiki users using a
> regular wiki account, same as with other wiki pages.

This i have no doubts about - but this is not the question.  The 
question is who is de facto in control of the information and in 
particular who defines what information is considered valid and what 
not.  And by designing the interfaces through which information and 
rules are entered you can pretty well control who will actually control 
the information.

I am fine with editing the wiki to document tags, i am also fine with 
the various templates in there even if they are sometimes cumbersome to 
understand.  And i acknowledge that technologically the way templates 
are used in the OSM wiki is a dead end.  But this whole wikibase thing 
is repulsive to me in the way it communicates the human editor is 
supposed to serve the computer system and not the other way round.  The 
very idea of making up numerical identifiers for keys and tags which by 
definition already are unique identifiers is ridiculous.

Long story short:  You will never get me to enter or edit tag 
documentation in such an interface which makes me think i have time 
traveled to the last century.  You will also not get me to write 
documentation in a place where non-human editors (a.k.a. bots) are 
allowed to modify what i wrote.  Apart from that if you find a way to 
improve they way in which tag documentation is stored and processed 
without sacrificing ergonomics and intuitive adaptability of the way it 
is entered for typical mappers i will be all for it.

The OSM wiki has a lot of problems and deficits but the vast majority of 
them are social in nature and will not be solved by means of 
technology - even if said technology is not on the level of the last 
century.

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



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