Talk:Main Page/Archive 3

This is an archive of old discussions moved from Talk:Main Page Please do not add further replies to these discussions. If you have further comments to make, or you want to revive a discussion, you might move it back to Talk:Main Page (or other talk pages), or create a new discussion there and just add a little link on here Old discussions remain here deliberately to allow searches to turn up old answers to questions.

Discuss BEFORE adding things

Obviously the Main Page is important. It has a significant role to play in shaping people's view of the project. The design of the page needs to reflect the correct weight of importance of pages being linked to (and not link to pages which are not important) There's nothing new or mysterious about this.

What it means though, is that we can't be having people slapping their ideas on here willy-nilly. For the most part we've been quite good about this over the past year or so (since we had a nice redesign of the homepage) but there's been a couple of, shall we say, 'under-developed' wiki ideas appearing as prominent links lately. So from now on the rule is simple...

Do not add/change things on the Main Page without discussing on this talk page first (and preferably leaving the discussion open for a while before applying a change). Edit's of the Main Page in violation of this rule, should be reverted.

Note that discussing your idea does not make your idea immune from being removed! It just means it is not in violation of this rule. It might still be deemed inappropriate for the Main Page.

I'm hoping that this will be universally accepted as common sense. If someone wants to argue about it, then I might have to write a "Wiki Policy". Don't make me do it! I will you know!

-- Harry Wood 16:08, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I understand the issue and respect it, but I completely missed this remark when editing my undiscussed change. On a closer look I found out that there is a comment in source of the Main page. My suggestion would be to make the comment as large as the editing page so you cannot miss it -- User: Altijd Verdwaald Sept 3, 2009

OK I've made that comment a bit more prominent -- Harry Wood 17:21, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

I've also added a similar comment to Template:Portals because people have been sneaking new links onto that template. May need to do the same for all the other included templates. -- Harry Wood 11:33, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Stats

I think the biggest casualty of this change is that interesting information about project has gone missing. Daily stats and other stat graphics have no access point. I finally found the user stats link on a German language page. I would think that stats would be an important use case. At least that's what inspired me as a young mapper. (Dr Kludge) 25 Aug 2014

I would say that https://www.openstreetmap.org/stats/data_stats.html is not something worth linking from main OSM Wiki page Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 06:26, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

Has anyone got proposal for something linkable? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 14:33, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

Resolved: Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 11:38, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

'No-knowledge rule'

I've just made a couple of minor changes to the Main Page without discussion, before I saw Harry Wood's flag at the top of this page saying no changes unless discussed. But ploughing on...

As a relatively new mapper (and a teacher), I feel a lot of OSM material, most noticably the wiki, is inadvertently written for insiders using in-group jargon. That creates barriers for newcomers, and tends to make for a closed and inward-looking community.

So especially on the Main Page, I'd suggest a 'no-knowledge rule' - everything should be intelligible to someone with no knowlege of OSM.

That means rather than a post about DWG, we would spell it out as the Data Working Group, with a link to their page on the wiki. (I'm not even sure that OSM shouldn't be avoided as an in-group acronym, but didn't attempt to change that.) Eteb3 (talk) 21:38, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

I support this, but the correct place for discussing general wiki issues in the wiki is Talk:Wiki. ;-) --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 17:14, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the support and for the info: I wasn't aware of that page. That said, my point was about the Main Page most especially: as the first contact many people will have with the wiki/with OSM, I think it's especially important. The wiki in general is a bigger ask for another day. :-) Eteb3 (talk) 22:08, 27 September 2019 (UTC)

Mention license handling

Would it be a good idea to mention https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Wiki#Designing_policy_for_handling_files_without_clear_license ? To my surprise so far basically noone commented despite that it affects over 20 000 files uploaded to OSM Wiki. Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 11:37, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

You could put it in the news section. If you want more feedback, you can post mention the discussion on the talk mailing list or initiate a post on weeklyosm.eu. --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 12:59, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

Platform status

Platform status information is updated only manually and never reflects a real time status. Some people seem to even assume this is being updated autoamtically: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2022-June/008367.html . As this is all highly confusing, I'd suggest to add some more explanations right next to the "Platform status" to make clear that it's only updated manually and does not show real time status information Mmd (talk) 13:13, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

IMHO the best way to prevent misunderstanding is to remove any green default display. Just a link to the platform status page, for the case if there is no current message. The other coloured displays for showing actual issues can (should) be kept, so if one provides a message, it will be noticeable. --Chris2map (talk) 13:32, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

It seems to be about Platform status. I would propose to delete not maintained https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Platform_Status&action=history and remove its use for start Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 15:55, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

Right, this is about Platform status (or rather, the template with status information, which is also included on the main page). It used to be quite relevant a few years ago when outages were much more common. Nowadays it's barely adding any value. Mmd (talk) 16:12, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

@Mmd: is there some automated version which is likely to be understood by nontechnical people? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 15:56, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

I think the only reasonable source for OSMF system issues is twitter.com/osm_tech - everything else, like uptime.openstreetmap.org, munin or prometheus are way too technical for typical users. In a non-wiki environment I would probably just embed the osm_tech twitter feed. However, I believe there's no easy way to accomplish something similar on the wiki. Mmd (talk) 16:12, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

I edited Platform Status and started removing various display, with plan of turning it into a small list of links directing to places where actual info can be found. And thanks for forwarding info about confusion! I posted also on Talk:Wiki to give other chance to comment before I will delete everything Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 16:34, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

I've retired the innocent green status display and put some information in to follow this changing. Have a look at Main page. Is that ok for a while? --Chris2map (talk) 19:44, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, looking good! That's pretty much what I had in mind. Mmd (talk) 08:46, 18 June 2022 (UTC)

Intersection with far away marked crossings

I am not so sure if there is a better place to place a question, but regarding the pedestrian routing guidelines, I have not seen a guideline in the case of having an intersection of two streets, where people can't simply cross through the intersection, but have to walk to a nearby crosswalk to cross the street.

I am not sure if it should be added a separate sidepath and end up with L-shaped crosswalks and foot=use_sidepath/no, I am not sure if this is fine instead and I am not sure what would actually be the tags in the road if that were the case. I see it as a fairly common case, yet I have not read anything about it in the pedestrian guideline, and other than learning about it myself I believe this should be explicitly stated in the guideline, because ultimately will lead to more realistic time estimations. Aucpp (talk) 19:26, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Hi! This page is good to discuss content of Main Page. IMHO a better place to discuss crossings would be Talk:Crossings, Talk:Key:crossing or Talk:Tag:crossing=no. I recommend you to move your question to one of those. (Or a general place with wide audience Talk:Wiki.) – To your question: I would set crossing=no on the intersection and map the nearby crossing(s) with nodes on the highways (streets) and crossing=* tags. --Chris2map (talk) 07:52, 30 September 2023 (UTC)