Hello everyone,
with the osm gadget working nicely in a number of Wikipedias, I was wondering if it would make sense to add an "edit" link to it? A link that would get you directly to the OpenStreetMap edit functionality for the displayed area.
I would guess that quite a number of wikipedia users / editors will not have heard of OpenStreetMap before and are thus not aware that you can edit and improve the maps just like one can improve the articles.
Adding an edit link to the osm gadget would potentially increase this awareness and therefore might help improve the quality of the maps included in Wikipedia. Especially if wikipedia editors would use the functionality, the maps would be improved in a way relevant to the articles. For example add missing footpaths leading up to the monument described in an article, or add the names in different languages. Therefore this would hopefully be a win both for Wikipedia and for OpenStreetMap.
There are however possibly a couple of down sides as well. For one, it might be confusing to wikipedians that you need a separate OpenStreetMap user account in order to edit the maps, as the Wikipedia account will obviously not do. Secondly, a lot of the embedded maps are by default zoomed out so far (e.g. city level) that it is not feasible to edit at that zoom level. The edit link would therefore have to be restricted to higher zoom levels. Thirdly, one would have to make sure people are aware that they are not only editing the map for this one article, but editing a world wide map database used for many purposes. I.e. make sure people don't for example delete some points of interest, because they think it makes the rendering in this article cluttered or in-appropriate, or add labels for non existent objects to make them show up on the map for the article.
So the question is, what do others think? Would this be a good idea overall? How would an edit link best be presented in the osm gadget? Any other thoughts on this topic?
Kai