On 12/30/11 00:50, Toby Murray wrote: > I do think there is a non-trivial technical difference between OSM and > wikipedia. The text of a given wikipedia article is 90% of the value. > It can be displayed as-is and still be useful. Making it pretty and > user-friendly is relatively trivial with some CSS or whatever. > > Our map data is completely different. It is absolutely useless to most > people without a rendering process which is much more complicated than > formatting some HTML. There are color schemes, rendering choices, > de-clutterification, regional cartographic conventions, etc, etc. > Which is why we leave it up to other people to do this since they can > make what they need out of our data.
Even more importantly it's quite easy to convert a wikipedia article to some sort of plain text as a basis for an entirely different encyclopedia, even without access to the source text version of the page. For Maps this is even harder to get from a pixel image back to some meaningful vector data.
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