Hi Hotties,
LearnOSM does a very great job in catching the newbies, giving them good
basis to start contributing to OpenStreetMap. The new design powered by
Mapbox is awesome, modern, and very attractive.
LearnOSM is with no doubt, a very important pillar of OSM.
Nevertheless, I have some concerns about its perimeter.
Here is my point: as I've stated, I have no problem about the function
of LearnOSM for newbies, but I doubt that it is a good way of storing
more advanced learning material.
OSM has already a wiki for this. And the wiki *is* part of the toolbox
of learning for an OSM editor. And thus isn't that the final step of
LearnOSM should be to guide the now-no-more-newbie to the wiki?
I see some disadvantages in using LearnOSM instead of the wiki for
*intermediate and advanced* materials:
- the workflow for publishing/updating the data is centralized: only the
HOT Github members (I am one) have the authorization to publish things
- the workflow for creating and updating the documentation is much
harder: using git is not like editing a wiki, and recent discussions on
IRC (in #hot), emails, and on Github issues shows that this is an
obstacle for some of us
- we should avoid creating a monoculture based on non open source and
non community based technologies, and, just a reminder, Github is not
open source
So here is what I suggest:
- stop publishing intermediate and advanced chapter through LearnOSM
- move the "Editing the wiki" chapter as last chapter of the beginners
section
- start contributing and focus to the wiki again, adding the advanced
chapters, and translation, and everything
- (why not) revamping the wiki look, to make it a little bit more
attractive and modern (yeah, long process, full of trolls in talk@,
etc., but that's a community way of growing, and that's what OSM is, a
community).
Of course, this is just my opinion.
Again, LearnOSM is a very nice and important project, I'm just wondering
about using it for advanced materials.
Thanks for reading, please discuss,
Yohan
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