Rowan Collins (rowan.collins@gmail.com) [041119 11:32]:
Wow! It seems a no-holds-barred fight is rapidly spreading through the world's media over whether Wikipedia is a hopeless idea, or the beginning of something amazing. [After the rash of warring blogs, now we're getting journalists with pretty good credentials...]
I saw an interesting thing at Dorkbot (http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotlondon/) last night: http://uo.space.frot.org/?LondonFreeMap - a Wiki-like mapping of the streets of London. They referred to Wikipedia as an example a lot. A friend who works for a mapping provider was there and didn't think much of the project (it's presently at a level only truly obsessive nerds could love), but I pointed out the example of Wikipedia as well ... it was a lot less impressive when it had thirty articles .
The point being that we are an example and inspiration for others.
(The reason for the need for an open-content map is that, unlike in the US where government data is p[ublic domain, the good data in the UK is owned by Ordnance Survey and is Crown Copyright. This is considered a bad thing.)
May the best man win, I guess - but lets hope we make some serious progress on validation soon, to give them an extra weapon or two...
Erm, yes. What was up with that proposed referencing syntax? Were any developers taking any notice?
(I'm going to have to learn decent Perl just to get my ideas into the codebase, aren't I.)
- d.