[Foundation-l] Wikipedia, the Pedia that used to be a Wiki

[Teofilo]

2011/1/5, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org>:
> On 05/01/11 00:33, Teofilo wrote:
>> We are more or less 24 hours (19 hours, exactly) after I corrected the
>> mistake, but the toolserver.org/~kolossos/openlayers is still wrong.
>> This is not what a wiki is supposed to be.
>
> You seem to be getting confused between a wiki and some software
> written by some Wikipedia user and not reviewed by anyone. If you
> don't like the quality of it, you shouldn't link to it from the geo
> templates.
>
> -- Tim Starling

You are totally right, but let's see the problem from a different
point of view. Let's look at it from the user's point of view. This is
a feature closely associated with Wikipedia. German speaking users
encounter it everytime they visit a geography Wikipedia article, like
a city, a castle, a museum, and it is located in a prominent place not
far from the foremost top right angle of the page. Other language
wikipedias are in the process of implementing it. On the French
language wikipedia, it happens on railway stations, German cities, and
pages randomly using the "coord" template for specific reasons.

So it is a de facto Wikipedia software, whether you like it or not.
Toolserver.org is a Wikimedia website, and most people would think
that it is a safe software condoned by the Wikimedia Foundation (or by
the Wikimedia German chapter). It is so closely associated with
Wikipedia and Wikimedia that most people would think that this is the
direction the Wikimedia management is leading the project into for the
future.

If it can update quickly enough so that you get the "I can correct
straightforward mistakes straight away" kind of feeling, it is
perfect, and my congratulations go to the developers who made that
wonderful tool.

Can't we boost the toolserver.org server so that it can update more
quickly ? Or integrate that tool into the main Wikipedia server ? (I
have reservations about the way Openstreetmap deals with authorship in
its use of Creative Commons licenses, but let's forget this).