[Foundation-l] Proposal for Wikimedia Weather

[Alex]

Tris Thomas wrote:
> Dear All,
> I don't know whether this has been discussed before, apologies if it has.
> 
> I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe 
> WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin.  Along 
> with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin 
> with), contributors could then put their weather where they are.  This 
> could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather 
> forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects 
> and anybody else.
> 
> Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Wikinews User Page <http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Tristan%20Thomas>

Except for forecasts (though it might be interesting to see how wiki
users compare to professional meteorologists), weather is mostly just
data, so computers can generally provide it better than people.

The only way I could see this as possibly being better than existing
services would be if it was set up so that people who had home weather
stations that could connect to a computer could automatically update the
site.

But A) that kind of equipment is expensive (at minimum ~$100 USD for
something that only records temperature) and B) it wouldn't really be a
wiki as the majority of the content would be automatically updated. Only
the forecasts would be human-produced.

Though you'd start to run into the principle of diminishing returns with
that - how much better is a weather report from 2 miles away versus 5
miles away? After a point, it just becomes redundant. And of course we'd
still have to rely on the weather services for things like radar and
satellite images.

-- 
Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)