On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 2:53 AM, Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> wrote: > 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!
Hi Frederik, Before getting into OSM, I did a lot of work with Wikipedia: writing articles, developing policies and guidelines, moderating the mailing lists, various cleanup etc, mostly in 2006-8. As noted, your example is poorly chosen: the goal of Wikipedia is to diseminate a high quality encyclopaedia to the world's people. Letting punters create tables easily is a low priority (and hard!), compared to all the infrastructure of actually serving up the content, making translations work, zillions of plugins, bots, browser support, the monster that is the wikitext parser etc. All the developer time has produced an enormous amount: a stable, high quality encyclopaedia that it's in the top 10 web sites, looks good, is searchable etc etc. > 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. I can't speak for the money side, but I'd like OSM to be more like Wikipedia in terms of the maturity of its community and its attitude towards content development. Wikipedia took a firm stand that the "healthy hothouse" attitude of the early days was just a passing phase: things had to settle down, standardise, become more process driven in order to produce high quality content. OSM has been around enough years now for something similar to have happened, but it hasn't. Newcomers are still encouraged to invent tags, and to ignore the wiki, because that's just "wikifiddling". Whereas Wikipedia takes policies and guidelines seriously, has large numbers of highly successful wikiprojects, has people who take responsibility for pretty boring things like stub and category management, and it works. Whereas one look at taginfo.openstreetmap.org will show you the complete chaos that we have - and it's not getting better. Wikipedia strives for high quality content, at the expensive of the contributor. OSM strives for ease of use for contributors, at the expense of content consumers. After all these years we still have no agreement about exactly what highway=path means, dozens of very common tags, or even sets of tags that consumers should support. > 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). Notability. People leave Wikipedia for all kinds of reasons. Those that leave because the content they were interested in creating wasn't within the scope of Wikipedia were obviously on the wrong project. You make this sound like a bad thing. > 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. They were created in pursuit of a goal, and they work. Best of all they focus debates, and move them forward. You can debate whether a given course of action fits within existing policies and guidelines, or you can debate whether the policy/guideline is right. But you don't start from scratch every single time like we do in OSM debates. Probably one reason that there are more policy/guidelines on Wikipedia is policy writing is a closer fit with encyclopaedia writing. Whereas geospatial types get frustrated quickly with writing text, I think. Steve _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
