Hi, On 01/09/13 13:26, Paweł Paprota wrote:
Projects like OSM do not run on fairy dust and rainbows. Yesterday I watched Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) on The Colbert Report talk show and he was talking about Wikipedia's strategy and budget. They spend nearly 30 million dollars a year on hardware, network, manpower (technical, administrative) just to keep Wikipedia running. Of course it is not nearly the same scale as OSM but the same principle starts to apply to OSM as I hope everyone wants OSM to be more like Wikipedia in terms of users and being well-known.
I'm very much an outsider to Wikimedia but if I look at how much money they have spent on development and how little has changed for the contributing user - adding a table to an article is practically as difficult now as it was five years ago. You sit there and wonder: How hard can it be? Hundreds of man-years of developer time... and still a person with average computer literacy cannot add a table to an article!
I have the highest respect for Wikipedia and what the movement has achieved, but if you are looking for proof that big money can actually be translated into direct ease of use for contributors, then you should really look elsewhere. If we embrace the Wikipedia model and achieve the same efficiency with regard to user interface advances, then iD will launch in 2016 and your history tab in 2018.
It is too simplistic, to say things like "everyone wants OSM to be more like Wikipedia in terms of <X>", because you can't always separate the good from the bad. It's easy to say "I'd like to have the kind of money that Wikimedia have" or "the popularity that Wikipedia enjoys" but none of this can be had without a downside.
For example, Wikipedia being as well known as it is has lead them to create "relevance criteria" - you can't create an article on a living person or a geographic feature, for example, unless that person or feature fulfills certain criteria. Wikipedians felt that this was necessary because they were swamped with data they considered irrelevant and un-encyclopedic. Many people left Wikipedia because of that (and indeed many of them are to be found in the ranks of OSM nowadays). I've heard other OSMers make fun of the tons of "WP:xxx" rules that Wikipedia has but I am sure they are not there because Wikipedians terribly enjoy rule-making - they probably had to be created in response to problems.
Same with money - an organisation that deals with a multi-million budget will automatically have a much higher overhead (recent Wikimedia fundraising has been criticized because they made it sound like your donation was for servers when in fact only 10% if it went to infrastructure or so) and there will be more fighting over who gets how much of the cake. If you believe that we're currently having heated discussions, imagine how such discussions would go if they were about the allocation of millions ;)
Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
