On Jul 29, 2008, at 0:21 , Frederik Ramm wrote: > > I believe that some people are very quick to simply transfer "lessons > learned" from Wikipedia onto OSM, sometimes without properly taking > into > account that while there are similarities, there are also lots of > differences.
There's another difference, which is quite important (to me at least). Wikipedia collects knowledge in general and a great deal of this knowledge (if not most of it) is partly subjective; in the end, the good faith of its contributors and the existence of a mechanism to verify it is important. Furthermore, there is stuff where the "objective truth" doesn't exist at all - all of this bring up the point of how much one trust in Wikipedia, if you prefer such an approach or the traditional one with an editor, a board of controllers, etc... On the contrary, OSM is documenting mostly factual data based on empirical observation (the GPS tracks). Yes, there are the boundary controversies etc, but fortunately they involve only a part of the world. Summing up, there are no strong problems of trust in OSM, while there are in Wikipedia, IMHO. -- Fabrizio Giudici, Ph.D. - Java Architect, Project Manager Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere." weblogs.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici - www.tidalwave.it/blog [EMAIL PROTECTED] - mobile: +39 348.150.6941 _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
