Tom Hughes wrote:
As to other sites, the problems are several fold - how do we decide to bless one particular site over another? not to mention the fact that we might end up driving more traffic to such sites than they could handle.
From a purely end-user perspective, having lots of third-party sites is both a strength and a weakness - it's great that there's lots of choice, but also confusing to newbies.
Take for example the perennial question "how do I get an OSM map on my Garmin Satnav?". The answers (e.g. on help.osm.org) tend to be "(pointing at the wiki) there at lots of different maps all displaying slightly different information, and (pointing at the wiki again) you can even make your own if you want to! But (pointing at http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/) here's what you _actually_ want, at least the first time you want to try it".
It's similar with download extracts - there are lots of places that you could download extracts from, but, as http://planet.osm.org/ currently does, there are two where it makes sense to look first.
There are lots of cases where it makes sense to have a cornucopia of different third-party options, but it's difficult to argue the benefit of variety for something simple like planet extracts. Obviously there are already a few "officially blessed" third-party sites around - (e.g. 3 of the 4 osm.org sets of map tiles).
Cheers, Andy _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
