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

[Cristian Consonni]

2013/8/25 Strainu <strainu10 at gmail.com>:
> 2013/8/25 Romaine Wiki <romaine_wiki at yahoo.com>:
>> Unfortunately I couldn't find any layer for Wikipedia on http://openstreetmap.org
>
> Perhaps the WMF should provide that? Kolossos has done a tremendous
> job with his work on the subject. Moving from the toolserver to the
> labs could be a good moment to increase the resource allocated to that
> project.
>
> I think OSM would be happy with the idea. One of their layers (the
> transport map) is already provided by a third party AFAIK.

This year at Wikimania in Hong Kong there has been a "Wikimaps" panel,
where it was discussed the possibility to duplicate the OSM whole
stack to serve OpenStreetMap in Wikipedia. The bottom line for me was
"we want more OpenStreetMap in Wikimedia projects". Many user active
in the field, some people from Wikidata and from WMF devs and staff
were there.

During that discussion the point that emerged was "it is doable, but
it is not easy to replicate the stack (or only the tileserver) to do
so some dedicated developers are needed", so my understanding is that
the point is "is this a need that is widespread enough that the
Foundation should look into it"?

As Peter said:

2013/8/25 Peter Gervai <grinapo at gmail.com>:
> On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.

Also, always in HK, there has been a OSM introductory workshop and a
brief mapping party organized by User:Aude.

>> We should strive on working together with OpenStreetMap, we supplement each other.

As I said in a thread some weeks ago in Italy, Wikimedia Italia (the
WMF Italian chapter) is discussing with the Italian OSM community to
make Wikimedia Italia also a OSMF chapter (they have the same model,
drawn mostly from our experience).

Besides that, I think I am happy with OSM being managed by another
entity (the OSM Foundation), I think that it is healtier for the the
FLOSS/OpenCulture movement and also it is better for OSM which is a
very big project. Of course in case of need e.g. if some government
try to censor OSM, I think that we as a community and also WMF should
weigh in.

2013/8/25 Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com>:
> http://openstreetmap.org - is just a starting point to OSM

About the main issue discussed here I quote completely Tomasz. This is
one of the first things to know about OSM, probably the tool you need
already exists, it is just out there.

IMHO, many people use Google Maps because "it just works", you write
"go from A to B" and it shows routing. Search "pizzeria" and they pop
out". OSM has all this stuff, but they are spread in different sites,
for example:
* http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing
* or the already cited
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM_based_Services

To me this looks a little like the people who are not using Linux
because they don't want to spend time/are not able to find their way
around distributions, versions and things like that; the perception
being that "there is only one Windows or Mac OS" (which is not true
but, that's the whole point).

Cristian