Re: [OSM-talk] Being more like Wikipedia (was: OpenStreetMap Future Look)
On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 2:53 AM, Frederik Ramm 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 ", 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
Re: [OSM-talk] Being more like Wikipedia (was: OpenStreetMap Future Look)
On 10 January 2013 02:41, Tom Morris wrote: > Scenarios where people are going to get upset over OpenStreetMaps are > considerably fewer than ones where people get upset with Wikipedia. (In fact, > when people do get upset about maps, they'll usually get upset with Wikipedia > too. At WikiConference India, members of the nationalist BJP protested > because of Wikipedia's map and description of the situation in Kashmir.*) Though offtopic , the same group also has another set of gang or groups which vandalises the wikipedia articles and you can hardly see any political articles on India with NPOV ( Neutral Point Of View) because a major group of editors come from a certain group and are well versed with all kinds of rules which wikipedia editors use to remove/revoke/edit an article . Coming to mapping in India , Kashmir might be the one border issue where "International territory " and "line of Control" are two different lines and can be interpreted by various cartographers in whatever way it pleases them . Google maps India doesnt even show the line of control , google maps US shows it as a dotted line , OSM shows it as bordder . I would admit the fact that OSM is not that popular ( atleast in India) that people who vandalise articles in wikipedia havent yet started . Lets say it to the advantage of the tools being hard to use even for the wikipedia editor , also would be the other fact that there is less data here(India) for them to seriously consider OSM as a map which needs to be checked up / bothered with . Google enjoys the complete dominant position with people fighting editor wars in mapmaker . Personally am I waiting for a surge of mappers ? No I am not , I would rather see a surge in mapping and effective usage of tags , hopefully which the future editors could clearly include some 2 minutes of tagging tutorial . Regards, Pavithran -- pavithran sakamuri http://look-pavi.blogspot.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Being more like Wikipedia (was: OpenStreetMap Future Look)
On Wednesday, 9 January 2013 at 15:53, Frederik Ramm 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! > I'll take off my OpenStreetMap pootling-around-Britain-with-a-camera-and-a-GPS hat off and put my Wikipedia administrator hat on and say… That's perhaps not a great example to choose. The visual editor only started development in 2011. Everyone in the community knew it was going to be a huge and massive slog to build the visual editor. Given what they are trying to do (retroactively specify a parsing model for Wikitext, write a bidirectional parser for it, then build an editor that has to cope with both mobile and desktop use in 280 languages), they are working ridiculously hard. The visual editor is scheduled to launch later this year. > > 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. > Well, we have to rein in people who like to make rules. A while back, someone was suggesting that we adopt a new notability criteria for civil aviation disasters. I was one of the few people from outside the aviation community on Wikipedia to step in and say "rules bloat!" In addition, a lot of the time it's not so much rule-making as consensus-documenting. We had to have a rethink a while back about notability criteria guidelines for pornography actors and actresses because the rules that the pornography enthusiasts had written were being ignored in practice. In that regard, it's rather like how OpenStreetMap works with taginfo and the OSM wiki - ideally, we stabilise and then canonise that which works in practice. As for the notability guidelines (the "relevance criteria" you refer to). There is a reason for that, and it's not necessarily because people create things that are irrelevant and unencyclopedic… though people do actually do that (the number of things I've deleted on the basis that are just things kids made up in school one day is pretty astounding). The notability guidelines are there because we judge notability on the basis of the presence of reliable sources. The reliable sources are there for the benefit of the reader: if the reader says "well, why should I trust what Wikipedia has to say on X?" and we say "well, here's a book, two articles in the Guardian and an article in the New York Times", that helps with verifiability. If there aren't any sources, the topic isn't "notable" (in the sense Wikipedia uses) not because we think it's bad or unimportant or crappy or not worth talking about but literally, nobody has taken any note of it! And if nobody has taken any note of it, we can't reliably source the claims made in the article, which sucks for readers. > > 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 ;) Plenty of those accusations were rather overblown. There is a legitimate kernel of complaint, which is that the infrastructure of the Wikimedia Chapters system can be a little bit bloated. There are reforms going on around financial accountability and movement finance. I'd tell you more, but the time I could have spent reading that kind of stuff I instead spend clicking buttons in JOSM… ;-) I think the important difference between Wikipedia/WMF and OSM is that the WMF exists because Wikipedia had explosive growth in 2004-2006. It's still growing massively obviously (in October 2012, Wikipedia had 488 million uniques; in April 2012, Wikipedia passed 2 billion mobile page views per month). But there were a lot of things that were absolutely
Re: [OSM-talk] Being more like Wikipedia (was: OpenStreetMap Future Look)
On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 7:53 AM, Frederik Ramm wrote: > 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. Frederik - I think we already have similar rule making issues. Just look at recent discussions on imports. Or how many left OSM because of the license change. Rules and policy changes have little to do with full time staffs. As you said, rules are there because there were needed. OSM changed the licensing because of a need. Can't OSM be more like Wikipedia and be the first choice to visit yet still be a fun place for mappers? I'd like to think so. We have some great tools for mappers. Potlatch is even being used by the USGS and bing looked into by the US National Park Service. And JOSM is great. Let's try to duplicate why users love Wikipedia, even though most are not contributors instead of just saying their model won't work for OSM. -- Clifford OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Being more like Wikipedia (was: OpenStreetMap Future Look)
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 ", 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
