On 22/04/2023 08:38, Mateusz Konieczny via talk wrote:
Wiki should not be mindlessly obeyed but it at least tends to be right.
[citation needed]
The OSM wiki tends to be many things, among those "somewhat helpful" and
"usually edited in good faith"; but "tends to be right" is very much a
stretch.
The current status of any page shows you what the last editor of a
particular page thought about something. Looking at the history, you
can see how other people thought too - and sometimes their views are
very different. The wiki doesn't necessarily help people understand
what OSM mappers in general think, because only a tiny fraction of OSM
mappers update the wiki. It's also not a great place to compare
versions and see who added what (there's no "blame" equivalent**).
One of the places where the wiki fails badly is where people have
different views. Partly this isn't the OSM wiki's fault -
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Forest tries its best to describe
the debacle there, but there are many pages that contain essentially the
same information, and monitoring and maintaining each and every one of
them would be more than a full-time job.
Often wiki pages are written by people only with knowledge that "this
OSM tag exists in the OSM database" not with any real-world
understanding of what a particular feature is. Often there are links to
wikipedia, when wikipedia has fundamentally different definition of what
some particular word means.
Another problem is maintenance. For example
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Walking_Routes#United_Kingdom is
just a couple of links, but the do look useful. The first,
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Long-distance_footpaths_in_the_United_Kingdom
exists, but some of the information is both not especially relevant and
somewhat misleading, e.g. "Completed 12/09/2009" - in reality there is
continual refinement going on with all of these as more detail is
added. Occasionally people introduce gaps by mistake and people fill
them in.
The other link
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Tagging_Guidelines#Tagging_Access_Provisions
just redirects to
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_Kingdom#Tagging_Access_Provisions
which does not exist. Clearly someone edited something but didn't
realise the links that they were breaking.
Best Regards,
Andy
** wikis do have the concept - see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiBlame .
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