Re: [OSM-talk] Announcing help.openstreetmap.org
Tom Hughes t...@compton.nu wrote: I suggest that people start by reading the FAQ which explains how the site should be used and what should (and shouldn't) be there. You can find the FAQ here: http://help.openstreetmap.org/faq/ and then get started asking (and answering) questions here: http://help.openstreetmap.org/ Thank you for your effort. This is really helpful stuff. But one question remains: Is there any reason, why you did not use the OSM-Wiki for that FAQ? IMHO it is not helpful, if the OSM documentation and help is cluttered to many locations. The user has to learn different ways of usage for each platform in order to contribute. Here you can find, how a question page and a FAQ could be integrated into the OSM-wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Help_desk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ The advantage of a wiki is further, that you do not have to report mistakes like here. People who find them, can correct them of their own. Further the Mediawiki, which is the content management system used for the OSM-wiki is (because Wikipedia) one of the best documented software ever. Also the OSM-Foundation seems to have found out, that cluttering and diverting their informations to several locations is not useful and finally bundled them to a wiki: http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page Possibly a point, to think over. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Announcing help.openstreetmap.org
On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 03:44:05PM +0200, Tirkon wrote: Thank you for your effort. This is really helpful stuff. But one question remains: Is there any reason, why you did not use the OSM-Wiki for that FAQ? Although wiki theoretically can be used this way, it is not the best tool for this job and in practice won't work, except for the regular wiki users (and we want the help for all OSM users). The same things can be done with wiki, web forum, mailing lists and the 'StackOverflow-like' software as now used on 'help.openstreetmap.org'. All of them were designed for a specific uses and most of them were abused for other tasks. And that usually doesn't work well. Wiki is good for writing of documentation, but not that good for discussion and question/answer interaction. It is effective for those task for people 'thinking wiki', but won't be good for a random user that comes there. Similarly, web forum is great for 'free discussion' and I have seen projects that used that also for generic documentation, but I hated that. It worked well for the regular forum visitors, but not for someone that came there for a piece of information. Also, where coming for an answer for specific question a web forum is not ideal – you don't know which section to look in and the question could be already asked and answered somewhere deep in a thread. That is why StackOverflow and similar sites are so successful recently – for the very task of asking and answering questions they are just better than a wiki, a mailing list or a web forum. This doesn't mean they make wiki, mailing lists and web forums obsolete – all of these may coexist and take advantage of each other (answers linking to wiki, forum redirecting to an answer). I am happy the new tool appeared and I hope it will be successful. Greets, Jacek ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Announcing help.openstreetmap.org
On 11/07/10 15:44, Tirkon wrote: But one question remains: Is there any reason, why you did not use the OSM-Wiki for that FAQ? IMHO it is not helpful, if the OSM documentation and help is cluttered to many locations. The user has to learn different ways of usage for each platform in order to contribute. The advantage of a Q+A site like this is that the karma/voting system allows the good questions and answers to float to the top and become visible above the noise. Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://compton.nu/ ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Announcing help.openstreetmap.org
Tom Hughes wrote: I'm be pleased to be able to announce a new addition to the tools available to support the OpenStreetMap project. Fantastic! http://help.openstreetmap.org/ There is an expection appearing on http://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/85/how-to-store-all-the-data-collected-during-mapping Alexander (PS: @Tom: this seems to be the actualy cause for the error-report that I have sent you in PM) ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Announcing help.openstreetmap.org
+1 Great work! I can see how the top questions will become a priority for us to try and solve. Because there is TONNES of work to be done, this puts focus on making the top questions answered. This, inturn, will attract the other developers out there (ie from KDE Marble Desktop, MapServer who might be able to teach and share new ways of using OSM data. As well, the answers provided ends up being the best. :-) kind of like Yahoo! Answers, but for OSM. Awesome! Sam On 7/11/10, Tom Hughes t...@compton.nu wrote: On 11/07/10 15:44, Tirkon wrote: But one question remains: Is there any reason, why you did not use the OSM-Wiki for that FAQ? IMHO it is not helpful, if the OSM documentation and help is cluttered to many locations. The user has to learn different ways of usage for each platform in order to contribute. The advantage of a Q+A site like this is that the karma/voting system allows the good questions and answers to float to the top and become visible above the noise. Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://compton.nu/ ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk -- Twitter: @Acrosscanada Blogs: http://acrosscanadatrails.posterous.com/ http://Acrosscanadatrails.blogspot.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sam.vekemans Skype: samvekemans IRC: irc://irc.oftc.net #osm-ca Canadian OSM channel (an open chat room) @Acrosscanadatrails ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Announcing help.openstreetmap.org
Jacek Konieczny wrote: The same things can be done with wiki, web forum, mailing lists and the 'StackOverflow-like' software as now used on 'help.openstreetmap.org'. All of them were designed for a specific uses and most of them were abused for other tasks. And that usually doesn't work well. In theory, I agree with this. I actually like the idea of Q+A sites and have already started to use this one. However, the problem is that the different platforms can only coexist well if questions get asked in (or moved to) the correct place. For example, I've seen people ask questions on obscure wiki talk pages, where they remained unanswered until someone happened to visit that talk page weeks later (and even when they aren't forgotten, using a wiki to imitate forum software is rather ugly). Similarly, diaries seem to be abused for forum-like questions. As I understand it, a Q+A site should be used for questions that can, in principle, be answered by a *single* post, if that post is well-written, comprehensive and factually correct. However, there are already questions on help.* that ask for personal preferences or opinions, or are likely to start discussions. Imo, there needs to be some mechanism to guide people to the right place for asking their questions, or moderation to move the question to the platform that's best suited for it. Tobias Knerr ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Announcing help.openstreetmap.org
On 11/07/10 18:40, Tobias Knerr wrote: However, there are already questions on help.* that ask for personal preferences or opinions, or are likely to start discussions. Imo, there needs to be some mechanism to guide people to the right place for asking their questions, or moderation to move the question to the platform that's best suited for it. People should be down voting and/or moderating such questions then. Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://compton.nu/ ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[talk-ph] Fwd: [OSM-talk] Announcing help.openstreetmap.org
Stack Overflow for OpenStreetMap! -- Forwarded message -- From: Tom Hughes t...@compton.nu Date: Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 4:06 PM Subject: [OSM-talk] Announcing help.openstreetmap.org To: OpenStreetMap Announce annou...@openstreetmap.org, OpenStreetMap Talk t...@openstreetmap.org I'm be pleased to be able to announce a new addition to the tools available to support the OpenStreetMap project. The new help.openstreetmap.org site is a StackOverflow style question and answer site where we can curate good answers to the questions people ask about how to both use OpenStreetMap and add to OpenStreetMap. As with StackOverflow users will earn karma which will in turn lead to earning rights to help moderate the questions and answers to ensure that the result is a useful knowledge base. I suggest that people start by reading the FAQ which explains how the site should be used and what should (and shouldn't) be there. You can find the FAQ here: http://help.openstreetmap.org/faq/ and then get started asking (and answering) questions here: http://help.openstreetmap.org/ Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://compton.nu/ ___ talk mailing list t...@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk -- http://vaes9.codedgraphic.com ___ talk-ph mailing list talk-ph@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ph
[OSM-talk] Announcing help.openstreetmap.org
I'm be pleased to be able to announce a new addition to the tools available to support the OpenStreetMap project. The new help.openstreetmap.org site is a StackOverflow style question and answer site where we can curate good answers to the questions people ask about how to both use OpenStreetMap and add to OpenStreetMap. As with StackOverflow users will earn karma which will in turn lead to earning rights to help moderate the questions and answers to ensure that the result is a useful knowledge base. I suggest that people start by reading the FAQ which explains how the site should be used and what should (and shouldn't) be there. You can find the FAQ here: http://help.openstreetmap.org/faq/ and then get started asking (and answering) questions here: http://help.openstreetmap.org/ Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://compton.nu/ ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Announcing help.openstreetmap.org
On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 08:06, Tom Hughes t...@compton.nu wrote: I'm be pleased to be able to announce a new addition to the tools available to support the OpenStreetMap project. The new help.openstreetmap.org site is a StackOverflow style question and answer site where we can curate good answers to the questions people ask about how to both use OpenStreetMap and add to OpenStreetMap. Nice, on the login screen it says Enter your OpenStreetMap username and password, but I can only log in with my OSM E-Mail + password, at which point it'll suggest my OSM username as a displayable Real Name. Why use CC-BY instead of CC-BY-SA like the OSM wiki? That means we can't base wiki help pages off good replies or questions on help.osm.org. Why was OSQA used instead of Shapado? I'm not familiar with the difference between them. But Shapado seems to have much better i18n support. AFACS OSQA only has some localizations for 5 languages, but Shapado has 50% localizations for ~14. Anyway, this is great stuff. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Announcing help.openstreetmap.org
Tom Hughes wrote: I'm be pleased to be able to announce a new addition to the tools available to support the OpenStreetMap project. The new help.openstreetmap.org site is a StackOverflow style question and answer site where we can curate good answers to the questions people ask about how to both use OpenStreetMap and add to OpenStreetMap. As with StackOverflow users will earn karma which will in turn lead to earning rights to help moderate the questions and answers to ensure that the result is a useful knowledge base. I suggest that people start by reading the FAQ which explains how the site should be used and what should (and shouldn't) be there. You can find the FAQ here: http://help.openstreetmap.org/faq/ and then get started asking (and answering) questions here: http://help.openstreetmap.org/ Tom I added a question Can I use these maps on my website. When I view it logged in I get an error which is a python error stack, when I delete the session cookie the question appears as expected. -- Cheers, Chris user: chillly ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[talk-au] Fwd: [OSM-talk] Announcing help.openstreetmap.org
-- Forwarded message -- From: Tom Hughes t...@compton.nu Date: 10 July 2010 18:06 Subject: [OSM-talk] Announcing help.openstreetmap.org To: OpenStreetMap Announce annou...@openstreetmap.org, OpenStreetMap Talk t...@openstreetmap.org I'm be pleased to be able to announce a new addition to the tools available to support the OpenStreetMap project. The new help.openstreetmap.org site is a StackOverflow style question and answer site where we can curate good answers to the questions people ask about how to both use OpenStreetMap and add to OpenStreetMap. As with StackOverflow users will earn karma which will in turn lead to earning rights to help moderate the questions and answers to ensure that the result is a useful knowledge base. I suggest that people start by reading the FAQ which explains how the site should be used and what should (and shouldn't) be there. You can find the FAQ here: http://help.openstreetmap.org/faq/ and then get started asking (and answering) questions here: http://help.openstreetmap.org/ Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://compton.nu/ ___ talk mailing list t...@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
