[OSM-talk] Improving ref=* documentation

[Tobias Knerr]

On 04.08.21 20:33, François Lacombe wrote:
> Here is this little draft of to-be w/References page.
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Fanfouer/References 
> 
> Some points may sounds obvious but It's better written, particularly 
> when on boarding new mappers or consumers.

When a topic is already documented on the wiki, my feeling is that 
creating _additional_ wiki pages about the topic with similar but 
slightly different content is often not going to help beginners.

Duplication means that there's now a larger amount of text to read 
through, and people tend to be confused about which page is the more 
correct/current one. It's common to end up with contradictions or stale 
pages at some point because people are far more willing to add text to 
the wiki than they are to update or delete it.

On a wiki, I think that improving the pages others have already created 
will often lead to better results. So here's my recommendation (which 
you are free to take or ignore):

Don't create a "References" page, as it would largely overlap with the 
content on "Key:ref". Instead, seeing how the really new part of your 
draft is the proposed process for tracking updates, create a page about 
that process. (Or about the topic of linking databases with references, 
perhaps – choose a title and scope that makes sense to you.)

For everything else, improve the Key:ref page where you feel that 
information is missing from it or presented poorly.

Just my two cents. :)