Wiki: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 07:18, 20 October 2022

The OpenStreetMap Wiki provides a place for collaboration, and a source of information related to OSM

The OpenStreetMap Wiki (this website) is a place for help documentation, technical documentation and promotional material on everything related to the OpenStreetMap project. It is not the OpenStreetMap project itself, but rather a documentation store designed to provide guidance for map contributors and users. Spend time to explore this site and discover new things about OpenStreetMap! The Main Page is a good starting point; so is the OSM category tree.

Content status and correctness

The Wiki aims to describe various common practices and community conventions, in particular the various mapping tags and the meanings of different values. Typically, the contents of the OSM Wiki are correct, but this is not guaranteed. In case of doubt, it is worth investigating the situation, e.g. reading the talk pages and linked discussions if you disagree with something recommended here.

The Wiki should not be treated as a final, fixed source of information. When there are explicit proposals and decisions, these tend to be documented in the wiki, and are indeed authoritative, see for example Organised Editing Guidelines. Some like vandalism are definitely true in general, but details on the page may be wrong. Other than that, the documentation present here is informative rather than prescriptive and authoritative (see Any tags you like). Tagging that went through proposal process were discussed, reviewed and approved is highly encouraged to be followed, but even in this cases it is not mandatory.

Note that the Wiki can have mistakes, missing information, outdated pages, outdated (or entirely missing) translations, and even pages written by people who documented their preferences rather than common tagging practices. Any help improving the content of the wiki is highly welcome!

Wikiteam

If you have ideas for the wiki, you can generally just do them, by editing the wiki! If you need any assistance the Wikiteam are here to help. We can provide help with general guidance, tables, templates, categories, and so on...

The team is a mix of normal users that manage and update our wiki articles, admins that work on technical requests. We are also Mappers too. Our common interest is the desire to make the wiki more user friendly. Anyone can join the Wikiteam. Its members are not elected or do not have any special role within the wiki. They just agreed to help you and decided on their own to act as janitors and consultants. To join the Wikiteam simply follow the instructions at Template:User WikiTeam.

List of all team members: Category:Wiki Team

Requests

The Wikiteam is happy to take requests at Talk:Wiki. Larger restructuring projects can also be discussed there. See also ongoing maintenance, in relation to Wiki maintenance tasks.

Tools

The wiki uses normal tools of the MediaWiki system, of course. The main ones are:

Technical Wiki Details

The wiki is powered by MediaWiki (http://mediawiki.org). See the "Special:Version" page for an up-to-date view of which version we are running, and what extensions are installed. For details of the server it is running on see https://hardware.openstreetmap.org/servers/konqi.openstreetmap.org/ (maintained by System administrators).

If you have ideas for technical improvements to the way the wiki works (e.g. extensions we should install), please take these to the discussion page here, and/or raise tickets in Talk:WikiProject Cleanup. As always, please do a few searches to see if anyone has already suggested the same thing (including a mailing list google to allow you to link related discussions).

Ongoing

Single sign on between wiki and the OSM front end, is an obvious suggestion which has been made and discussed repeatedly.
Migrating part of the Wiki Translation to the Translate extension has also been discussed: see Proposed features/Add Translate extension to Wiki which was accepted. Implementation awaits solving some technical issues. (TODO: link relevant github issues)
- Requires upgrading Mediawiki to 1.38 from current version ( https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/760 )
  - This requires new extension for map display ( https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/749 )

Wiki Dumps / Export

Daily full history exports of this wiki are available here:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/dump/ (4.6GB as of 17 November 2021^[update])

This is configured to run dumpBackup.php with --full (All revisions) each morning.

If you want a much older snapshot for some reason:

dump file from March 2013 (75Mb)

@@ Line 9: / Line 9: @@
 The Wiki aims to describe various common practices and community conventions, in particular the various mapping tags and the meanings of different values. Typically, the contents of the OSM Wiki are correct, but this is not guaranteed. In case of doubt, it is worth investigating the situation, e.g. reading the talk pages and linked discussions if you disagree with something recommended here.
-The Wiki should not be treated as a final, fixed source of information. When there are explicit proposals and decisions, these tend to be documented in the wiki, and are indeed authoritative, see for example [[Organised Editing Guidelines]]. Other than that, the documentation present here is informative rather than prescriptive and authoritative (see [[Any tags you like]]). Tagging that went through [[proposal process]] were discussed, reviewed and approved is highly encouraged to be followed, but even in this cases it is not mandatory.
+The Wiki should not be treated as a final, fixed source of information. When there are explicit proposals and decisions, these tend to be documented in the wiki, and are indeed authoritative, see for example [[Organised Editing Guidelines]]. Some like [[vandalism]] are definitely true in general, but details on the page may be wrong. Other than that, the documentation present here is informative rather than prescriptive and authoritative (see [[Any tags you like]]). Tagging that went through [[proposal process]] were discussed, reviewed and approved is highly encouraged to be followed, but even in this cases it is not mandatory.
 Note that the Wiki can have mistakes, missing information, outdated pages, outdated (or entirely missing) translations, and even pages written by people who documented their preferences rather than common tagging practices. Any help improving the content of the wiki is highly welcome!