[Wikimedia-l] The failure of Google, looking for open source alternatives

[Peter Gervai]

On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com> wrote:

> Bear in mind that OSM is a community such as we are, with its own
> habits and ideas.

As I happen to be one of the more active ones in Hungary. :-)

> The idea of OSM is to have everything in one databse

Nope. You will not see there wikipedia articles or photos. ;-) What
you may see are pointers to external resources, but many of these
resources doesn't exist (like something similar to panoramio which
hosts geocoded images in vast amounts).

> You can also propose a new features to be added to the official OSM
> database schema.

It is not a question of OSM database, it's a question of services
based on the database, especially those related to slippy map with
mapped external content. OSMF doesn't have the resources to get this
done, and they even struggle under the load of their tile server being
used by the general public. In fact you're advised against using their
tile server and you are advised to create one for your own. For
example this is one point where WMF _may_ be able to help, but it's a
high demand service.

>  OSM has actually its own API which is free to use:

I do not think Wikipedia should get deeply involved in _editing_ the
db and firing shitloads of queries at the API will surely help
Wikipedia getting banned from using it. ;-)
Whatever we do it should be based on the minute diffs and our own processing.
But really I do not talk about the db, I talk about it's
representation (tiles) and it's interface (slippy map with additional
geocoded layers).

g