User talk:Harry Wood

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Welcome - GPS Unit

Welcome to OSM! You should get yourself a GPS receiver. In theory Open Street Map allows a division of labour, where some people gather GPS tracks and others draw maps from them, or develop the mapping data further in other ways. But in practice you can only understand the system if you master the entire value chain. Make sure you get one from which you can download the tracklog file (most automobile models don't seem to offer this feature) and make sure you get the PC cable (serial or USB) included in the price (can be expensive as an accessory). --LA2 19:06, 30 Jan 2006 (GMT)

Help Page

Nice work on the help page. Perhaps you could take a look at some of the other areas, they sure could do with some reorganisation and simplification. -- Blackadder 09:17, 23 Feb 2006 (UTC)

PD-user template

Hi Harry, I noted your clarification on the PD-user template. Though I do see your point...

  • A long paragraph sits very uneasily in the embedded box style.
  • It is already possible to determine sole authorship for software (via trac's revisions system), so it's not true to say that it's only a gesture.
  • Making your own contributions PD doesn't necessarily mean that you support the whole of OSM going PD, as the 'clarification' implies.
  • It's a little ethically dubious to change such a declaration after several people have already signed up to it. They may not agree with the wording of your clarification. (This is, of course, one of the 'fun' things about wikis!)
  • Given that the licence debate can get heated, it's probably not politic to add interpretations to other people's views. (You could, of course, always set up a PD-user-with-clarification category.)

Consequently I've reverted it. If you think it's still necessary, I'd suggest we work together on adding an wiki.osm.org page about Public domain, in place of the Wikipedia link. (In turn, this would probably link to the WP page.)
cheers
Richard 12:33, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Fair enough Richard. I think a clarification is needed on there, but you're right it should probably be discussed first. Template talk:PD-user would be the place to do so I guess -- Harry Wood 12:54, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

sysop

done! use wisely. :) Morwen 12:25, 29 June 2007 (BST)


Cleanup

Three cheers for all the cleanup stuff you're doing - it's making things much clearer. Could I add About to your list? It's very out of date.

Might be good to have more prominent links to the Foundation page, too (see recent debate on talk list). --Richard 09:10, 2 July 2007 (BST)

Hmm yeah some of those About page links are a bit odd. I had been fiddling there to try and sort out the translation links, but yes the english version really isn't that great is it? I will attack it at some point -- Harry Wood 12:55, 2 July 2007 (BST)

Hello Harry
At the Category:Labelled_for_deletion page are 218 pages linked, some labbeled by me. Is it possible to delete some of these in the next time. After that it is easier to find pages which should deleted. Thanks, Markus --Uboot 15:15, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the editing tips for GeoBase Import, much appreciated. I just have a couple discussion points with other users (via email), then I think i'll be able to separate the facts from the discussion points much better :) --acrosscanadatrails 08:18, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Have you seen the Wiki organisation page. It looks like it could act as a really good starting point for a re-new'd enthusiasm for getting the Wiki a bit more organised. It could be a starting point for the "Page Naming Guidelines" you were thinking of writting?

Martin Renvoize 12:19, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Hey Harry, what superseded this themplate. It's still mentioned in this page and could do with being re-directed, or the other page deleting too. I'm usre it's duplicated somewhere, but i'm not sure where yet!?

Martin Renvoize 12:03, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Osmosis

Hi Harry, thanks for the new Osmosis page. It's been on my TODO list for a while :-) Ideally I should add everything on my own wiki to this page, I only put it on mine because I knew how to use it.

The tool is pretty rough around the edges at the moment, if I can get a couple of nights on it I should be able to tidy it up a bit.

At that point I should add a couple of links from other pages on the wiki ...

PS. Haven't added one of these talk messages before, hopefully I get it right :-)

Cheers, Brett 14:50, 11 July 2007 (AEST)

São Paulo

Hi Harry, glad to know you're coming here (business or vacation?). I bought a GPS a few months ago and since then I had focused on mapping the longest highways by car and my neighborhood by motorbike taking pictures of street signs. Right now it seems that I am the only OSM user in this 14 million city and I'll be glad to welcome you here. Please drop me a note with further details (claudomiro|gmail^com) Claudomiro 23:15, 16 August 2007 (BST)

Thanks for the Welcome

Hi Harry, Thanks for the welcome. I have started to map Islamabad and Rawalpindi. I live in Rawalpindi and work in Islamabad. Will contribute more as I collect more traces and master JOSM.

Sharjeel Aziz 23:06, 29 August 2007 (PKST)

Canberra Animation

Hi Harry, I'm glad you found my Canberra OSM progress animation, and am delighted you consider it worth nominating as a featured image. I plan to continue adding frames to it, but the increasing coverage is beginning to stretch the capabilities of my RAM! Even if I continue to add weekly frames, it would be great to have it as a feature image. Latch 01:31, 4 September 2007 (BST)

OS WMS

Hi, I saw you talking about the OS WMS services last night in #osm, I've done some experiments with it in openlayers already and got something working.

Their WMS server seems quite limited, only providing output as the OS projection, a fixed tilesize (which changes depending on zoomlevel as well!).

My work so far is at [1] I also hope to get around to writing my findings sometime..

--Edgemaster 09:48, 22 October 2007 (BST)

Looks great! I didn't realise ordnance survey had a public WMS server actually. The WMS Server you're pointing at is here: explore.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/OSMapAPIWebApp/osmapapiwms but where is it described on the OS website? That's the first time I've seen a full screen OS map on the web. Are you really allowed to present them like that? By the way, internet explorer 7 covers up the copyright notice (firefox does the nice transparent strip at the bottom)
Here at the council office I'm working at, we have something called "PlanAccess". I've managed to hook OpenLayers into the WMS source which this provides. This seems to be doing on-the-fly rendering of very detailed ordnance survey data (Is it called "MasterMap" when you can see the building outlines and everything?) So this looks great.
I was hoping to sneak in openstreetmap as an optional layer, more as an advert for OSM than anything they would actually find useful (given the detail that PlanAccess provides) Unfortunately Christopher Schmidt was explaining that OpenLayers wont allow me to simply reference the rendered tiles from OSM servers, becuase they're using a different projection. I'm not actually sure what projection it is, but safe to say it aint the same as OSM's.
He suggested re-rendering OSM data with a matching projection, but this means setting up python-mapnik-tilechache, and some facility for synching & re-rendering as the OSM data improves. All a bit tricky. Actually anything requiring server hardware and running applications, is no longer a sneaky thing I can put in place without anyone noticing... well probably not. I could try -- Harry Wood 10:57, 22 October 2007 (BST)
Legally, it's probably a very black area. Their ToS forbids hyperlinking to any part of their site. Ripping the images from their servers probably contradicts their ToS as well as copyright. (Although I do attribute it to them). Conflicting projections are annoying, I'd have wanted to slip OSM into my project that uses that OS 50k map. --Edgemaster 20:07, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Google SOC

Thanks for the reminder Harry. I am still interested. And now is the right time to plan. I have some contacts at Google we should follow up with to make sure OSM is signed up.

Wikitravel

Thanks for your note! I'm blown away by how much OSM has progressed since I last took a look, and I'm convinced the future of Wikitravel mapping will be with OSM. I'm now heading Wikitravel's print spinoff Wikitravel Press and trying to figure out how to export OSM data via Osmarender, please do chip in at Talk:Osmarender if you have any ideas. I've also signed up on MediaWiki extension. Jpatokal 14:14, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Source for Components.png

Hi Harry, i'm interested in translating the Component Overview you created into german, so i would be glad if you could send me the SVG source for the Components Diagram (Components.png). My mail address is florian <dot> schmitt <at> gmx <dot> net. --Florianschmitt 14:04, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Planet diff description

Harry, sorry for delay, I will add some clarification on how the planet diffs work as per your request on my talk page, just been distracted by other things. Will try to get it done over next day or two. I've been thinking about doing it as a separate page dedicated to daily diffs. --Brett 12:22, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Internationalization of the map features page

Hi Harry, as you are one of the persons who tries to keep the wiki a bit less chaotic, I would appreciate if you could have a look on my proposal for the "map features" page internationalization here Talk:Map_Features and provide some comments. I know that using templates has pros and cons but at least, it's the best mean I see at the moment to create an up-to-date page for all languages. Or you may have other suggestions/ideas/tools which could help the translators. -Pieren 15:05, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Captcha-like thing

Dear Mr Wiki... is it possible to stop the annoying "tell us what 37+2 is" when you've added a link to openstreetmap.org? I can understand its purpose in preventing links to spammy sites, but osm.org surely isn't one of them... --Richard 10:31, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Done! (I think) I tested in Sandbox and I think it's working better now
I was expecting the answer to be "No because I'm not a System Administrator", but I thought I'd investigate and figure out exactly what we need to ask them to do, and it turns out that I could fix it (as a sysop) by editing this system message page: MediaWiki:Captcha-addurl-whitelist
-- Harry Wood 11:10, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Spoke too soon didn't I? hmmm let me see. Why isn't that working? -- Harry Wood 11:41, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for sorting it! --Richard 17:15, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Licence vs license

In British English, "licence" is the noun, "license" the verb. (Mnemonic: "I advise you to follow my advice.) In American English, "license" is used for both. British English is probably slightly more the lingua franca of OSM than American. :) --Richard 17:15, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Aha it's those Americans confusing me is it? For a long time I was flitting between spellings randomly.
Nouns hey? So actually the page called "OpenStreetMap License" should be "OpenStreetMap Licence".
Ah well. Could go do some page moving, but that might add another new dimension to the licence debate!
-- Harry Wood 17:44, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

"Incorrect" Use of Yahoo Imagary

I noticed you reverted my change on the South East London Mapping Party page saying: '"incorrectly" because the recommendation is to sketch in untagged ways (*without* highway tag)' due to it appearing mapped. I found the recommendation for using untagged ways and found you were the one who wrote this recommendation. I don't see any consensus to justify calling it correct or incorrect.

Although your way suits your work flow, it does not particularly suit mine. I can download this to my GPS and it assists me in GPS surveying. I can find and correct as I go. Also the road names are available in the ABC Street Atlas of London 1933/4 - I have started adding roads around Woolwich using this method. Manual surveying should be the last resort (although it is the only resort in most cases!)

If we want to find unnamed roads, we can use the maplint layer. Tracking progress of mapping should be done on the wiki rather than the aesthetics of the map (again IMHO). Your work on Kosmos looks very promising in this regard - so why do we need the map to look blank in unnamed road areas?

You seem to be assuming that no one uses OSM for navigation currently. These tagged highways actually might be useful?

I don't accept my method as incorrect. GPS surveying is not the only way to do "proper mapping". Incidentally, is there anywhere in London that has untagged highways? (I promise I won't tag it - yet!) --TimSC 18:18, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Yeah I was taking the opportunity to raise this point again by sneaking the word "incorrectly" in there. Bit cheeky I know. I think you're misinterpreting my message though. I'm actually pro yahoo sketching.
The instructions on how to sketch over yahoo imagery can be found at Yahoo#How to sketch?. As you noticed, I wrote the instructions ...but I did write them based on what I'd read in a mailing list posts / some IRC converstations. And more importantly, I wrote them almost a year ago. There's been plenty of time for people to correct the instructions, if this is not what the consensus is, or even just to call them into question on the talk page. ...but nothing.
It's been frustrating for me actually. I've had very little feedback on this, but I'm also asking for action on my request to change the rendering. Have a read here: Talk:Yahoo! Aerial Imagery#Sketching - Is just tracing useful?.
Maybe nobody has responded to that because I've gone off on a massive rant, but the idea is simple. I've requested the change here too, but no response.
Have a read and let me know what you think. You're involved in sketching alongside other surveyed maps in London (as I am), so I'd be interested in your point of view. Hopefully you'll agree that a simple rendering change could solve the problem
-- Harry Wood 15:31, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
Generally people don't respond to discussions here because it's not the commonly accepted channel. The standard discussion channel is the talk mailing list - for everything except for tagging, which takes place on the wiki. Most probably, the people who would actually change the rendering haven't actually seen your request.
I realise you might not want to subject your inbox to an onslaught from lists.openstreetmap.org, which I can entirely understand, but Nabble should help. cheers --Richard 16:04, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
I am moving my responses to the Yahoo imagery talk page which seems more appropriate now. --TimSC 17:47, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
FWIW, Birmingham has lots of untagged ways. And with the possible ownership change of Yahoo, I consider it absolutely fine to trace as much as possible while we still may access the aerial images, even if the highway tag is missing or wrong or has no name tag. --Colin Marquardt 11:08, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

AND China data

Hi, I think the China data from AND was not imported, but dkt (D. Tucny) had imported some other dataset with chinese town names a week before (I cannot reach IRC from there and so cannot ask him and fix it myself). The AND data for China has been deemed too low quality. --Colin Marquardt 11:03, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Bold in the calendar

Hi Harry, i was suposing the bold was to hilight the mapping parties, not the number of partecipants :) I hope to have 10 thousand people at Rovigo. :) --EdoM (lets talk about it) 16:56, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

No no. It's based on number of partcipants. ...not that it really matters I suppose. But hopefully it'll be a bold event soon hey? hmmmm maybe I should plan a "holiday" in Italy. -- Harry Wood 17:41, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
You'll be welcome :) but you should reply in my talk page.. :P --EdoM (lets talk about it) 17:54, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

OS 1914 Data..

Thanks for formatting it :)

If you have access to a libray that has the 1:2500 originals of the date shown you may wish to consider obtaining tracings, or carefully use a length of thread to record the actual distances for the survey points..

Don't use the current OS MasterMap in ANY from to confirm the figures... It has to be from a 'physical' 1:2500 from prior to 1955 !!!

ShakespeareFan00 23:23, 5 April 2008 (BST)

Map Features

could you fix the other languages in the same way you done for the english page? TIA --EdoM (lets talk about it) 22:16, 8 April 2008 (BST)

Could you check my comments in the forum topic ? Pieren 17:21, 9 April 2008 (BST)
Sent today on the forum about this topic:
For the wiki administrator:
the PHP environment is currently limited to 12MB (said in the error report "Allowed memory size of 12582912 bytes exhausted").
A short look on the mediawiki:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Er … x_bytes.29
says:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of xxxxxxx bytes exhausted (tried to allocate xxxx bytes)
Raise PHP's memory limit in php.ini:
memory_limit = 32M  ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (32MB)
(also on other forums talking about this topic, e.g. ::http://www.mwusers.com/forums/archive/i … -3806.html)
I see that the wiki server is a VM using 512MB (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Servers/vm).
I don't think that allocating 20Mb more (12Mb -> 32Mb) for the wiki would have a serious impact on the server.
And with this value, it will still be possible to display most of the common tags in a single page. Pieren 13:06, 11 April 2008 (BST)

London Border Map

Nicely simple rendering, would be good to get more of London in the view - the whole of Sutton's border is complete. --Thomas Wood 17:34, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

I did an update to Image:London-borough-boundaries.png today. It includes Sutton now. Well done gathering the border data. You've put us central londoners to shame! -- Harry Wood 23:26, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
I've been working on getting the relations done up for the current London boundaries, I've also updated Image:London-borough-boundaries.png with a new (shinier) version from the OSM Inspector. --Thomas Wood 16:59, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

A couple of wiki questions

Hi, I'm new to OSM, so I hope I'm not bothering with questions that might have been answered somewhere, but I wasn't able to find :-)

  1. I was trying to reduce font size in Template:PD-user, as you asked for in the talk page, but using a div style my edit was blocked by spamlist match for "<div" (see talk history) Is it a choice to avoid styling, am I still not an autoconfirmed user to insert divs, or ... ? :-) Fun, it works well in preview :-)
  2. Planning to translate some pages into Italian, I haven't found any guidelines for page titles. I have read the discussion about tags and keys, but what about other kind of pages (i.e. legal, administrative, etc)? Are index.php/Something/It titles accepted? Same for templates?
  3. Any guidelines for categories?

Thank you in advance :-) --Mr G 00:05, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

No problems. I can answer some of these questions.
  1. For div styles the trick is to use upper case DIV. So <DIV style="font-size:0.8em;">smaller text</DIV>. See Talk:Wiki#$wgSpamRegex blocking all divs (we should change this really).
  2. Italian translated wiki pages should be of the form index.php/It:Something. And actually in many cases the 'Something' title would be the english word. This is not ideal, but it does make it clear which page this is a translation of, and enables templates like Template:Languages to work (example usage: OpenStreetMap License) We haven't really settled on an approach though. There are some other similar templates. Some people have started creating a new template for each page, so the About page has a special "Template:Language-about" for example. That's only been done for key pages though. You'll notice that not every translated page follows the same name rules. Click around the About links, and most of them are called xx:About, but then there's "Introduktion på svenska" which screws the system up a bit! I suppose we should really kick off a centralised discussion about how we want to manage wiki page translations.
  3. For categories, again we should maybe put together a page of wiki guidelines on how we want to use categories. Personally I don't actually use categories that much. I prefer to just make sure that in-page links form a useful navigation hierarchy to group related pages. But categories come in handy for some things. Basically you'll need to just look around and try to make sure somebody didn't already have the same idea as you, before introducing any new category idea. Other than that, there's no rules in place. It's a free for all!
Hope that answers your questions. Feel free to put forward your own ideas for how to organise these things. I'm trying to group together/link any wiki organisational information at WikiProject Cleanup, and there's the more general "Wiki" page.
-- Harry Wood 09:15, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Delete page Tag:waterway=riverbank

I know that you have admin rights in the wiki. So could you please remove completely the page Tag:waterway=riverbank thus offering the possibility to move the right page Waterway/riverbank to its final (I hope) location with all its history attached. We reached this strange situation after some merges I think. Just delete the old page, I can move the right page and update the links myself. Then, hopefully, naming convention will be preserved ;-) Thanks.--Pieren 09:37, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Ah yeah I was just contemplating doing that move about an hour ago. It is done! -- Harry Wood 10:51, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

I would like you to comment on this "multilingual ability"

Hi Harry, I have written a comment on multilingual ability and I would like to ask you if you can comment it. Thanks, --PMay 10:10, 23 June 2008 (UTC)


Gumtree Promotion

It's easy to advertise the London Mapping events on Gumtree by posting a community ad. One problem is I'm not sure if this is suitable for complete beginners. The meet-up seems to be afterwards, whereas newbies would need a time and place to meet up and be briefed.

Could you list it on upcoming as before and I'll put a copy on Gumtree? --OliverLondon 10:51, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

re MapOf broken

Hi Harry, thanks for letting me know. Actually I didn't know the wiki plugin was using MapOf. Cool. Sorry for not replying earlier, but I was firefighting the new t@h server and had little time for anything not emergency-related. Due to your comment, I made MapOf return jpeg format again and also made it return the correct image dimensions. Yes, the offset is still not always right. I will be looking into this. But let me explain why I don't just use the old version. Tiles in the new server are stored as one file per tileset. For this reason the old PHP script can not just fetch the tiles as before. And as the whole server is now running in python, I decided that it would just be easier to also have this in python. To sum it up, the old PHP just wouldn't work as easily as before, and I didn't really have time to look a lot into the python version. If you can get OJW to provide a patch to fix the offset now, that would be great. Otherwise it will have to wait until the most pressing issues (ie server crashes) are solved. --spaetz 10:21, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
  • Fixed now. It still needs to time out in the cache until you see the result. But the UK looks good now too. --spaetz 08:30, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
  • exported images have OSM attribution included now, for osmarender at least. This clashes with your attribution label you use. Either you disable the attribution with a "&skip_attr=1" appended to the URL or you disable your attribution string for osmarender excerpts. --spaetz 10:22, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Semantic Mediawiki

Seems you're a wiki expert, so I'd like to hear your opinion on this: I've been playing around with the Semantic Mediawiki extension [2] and think it could be a great help for sorting out the Map Features and Proposed Features mess. See also [3]. Do you have experience with it? Would it work, or is it too expensive load-wise? Cheers, Robx 08:46, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Yeah I've certainly heard of semantic mediawiki, but never really tried it out. Maybe I'll try this extension on my wiki on a stick and see how it works (can't promise I will get around to doing that very soon though). It could be good for Map Features, or I guess it could be one of these things which just overcompicates matters (in terms of ease of editing the wiki pages) But yeah machine readeability would good. -- Harry Wood 14:16, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
I have a running semantic system and I can say it's really more complicated than to edit Map Features per hand. I don't believe for instance that it is possible to bring the images in the right size in the table. So it has no flexibility. And I hear that semantic wiki is a performance killer.
On the other hand machine readability is really nice, the creating of OSMhack was a really stupid work for me for some hours. But ok.
I see to other kinds of data in the wiki which could be interesting for "semantification". The events could be handle on a live calendar like this it looks very coool, but is it really neccesary? The second datas are the coordinates in Template:Places but there I see no real usage in the moment. In summary I believe the wiki should be a fast and easy to use communication and documentation platform without semantic, because OSM is hard enought.;-) And machine readability can also be done by Wiki-templates and external script. --Kolossos 17:06, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
Hmm. For an OSM project in Berlin, we've been experimenting with this: [4]. The table [5] is generated by SMW, and Attribut:Tagged provides a nice summary of how features can be mapped. I think it's kind of nice, but then I didn't try to make tables containing images so far. Also, I have no idea whether it could handle a wiki the size of this one. But would it be worse than our current use of templates?
I don't agree that it's complex to use: Slightly modifying the standard templates like Template:KeyDescription and Template:Proposal Page would give immediate benefits without requiring the general users to learn anything new. It would then be straightforward to generate say the multitude of tables in the proposal process automatically.
Of course, there would be no need to replace Map features: We could leave it as is, and test an automatically generated SMW test/Map features. Cheers, Robx 14:54, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
I agree with Robx that this extintion would help tromendously on the proposed feature page. Users cerrently have the problem of updating the template status on the proposal page but not the status on the proposed feature lists. With this extention the list could be automaticly updated and soulve many problems with the proposal process. --Nickvet419 23:53, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Hi Harry, in the meantime we've defined a proposal for a Machine-readable Map Feature list and we got a prototype for the OSM wiki with semantic extensions up and running. The prototype demonstrates that semantic extensions don't complicate maintaining the wiki, but they help a lot to get a complete and consistent list of map features outside of the wiki. User:Firefishy told me that you would probably be the guy to ask if we wanted to push this approach. What's your opinion about this? Do you think SMW could be installed on the production site? Gubaer 19:48, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Switch SlippyMap

Hi Harry

The new version of SlippyMap is developing quite nicely. I would like to bump the version on the OSM wiki to the new version: http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/SlippyMap/ and http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SlippyMap

Problem is, the new version has incompatible syntax. Do you know if there a quick way to find out which pages use SlippyMap?

- Firefishy 08:41, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Ah ok. Different syntax.
Unfortunately I don't think there is a nifty way of finding all the pages using it (not like using 'what links here' for templates for example) but just searching for 'slippymap' does turn up those pages along with some other matches.
Doesn't matter hugely if it gets broken for a little while. People will fix it themselves if we explain the new syntax (The Simple image one was broken for a few weeks while they were fiddling with the t@h set-up, and nobody seemed to be too upset) Another option would be to add a wee hack in the extension which detects the old syntax and gives a good error message.
-- Harry Wood 09:22, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Street name abbreviations

This is one of the many india specific problems that we are going to face. if you compare a map of london and chennai on the same zoom level, you well notice that there are a lot more roads in India. Initially i found that almost none of the road names were showing up completely as the names were too long for the short streets. Either there has to be a rendering rule which would automatically shorten the names or it would have to be done manually if we are to get a non cluttered map. The problem is more compounded when the long road names are rendered distorted on a very shaky road making the map unreadable. Maybe not the optimal solution, but it addresses the issue for now -- PlaneMad|YakYak 17:22, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Request to block the wiki user User:Chriscf

Hi Harry, I know you are one of the wiki administrators and I don't where else I could apply this request. It's about User:Chriscf who is continuing to create a lot of troubles on the wiki. His main concern about "smoothness" should be closed now since the key is disabled in "Map Features" by User:Hawke the 4th Dec and the discussion is re-opened. But he still undo other edits about this controversy and does not accept that the Map Features template as it now Template:Map Features:smoothness although others already asked him to stop these unproductive aggressive comments/undo's here. I tried all my best to involve more people and not only the four same guys fighting since weeks now in order to find a real consensus. But I see now that this person is inflexible and will never accept this key even with other values or other names (I changed the header of Template:Map Features:smoothness to explain the controversy but even that was removed by the guy). He does not want to see the templace even if the template is not in Map Features ! He is just against the concept. This is totally against the spirit of the whole project. That's why I would suggest to block/disable this user, maybe temporarily. Your opinion ? -- Pieren 13:13, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

I noticed you were involved in trying to mediate this dispute earlier on. Thanks for that. There's ongoing discussion over at Talk:Proposed features#Drifting from reality. I can block him from the wiki, but I'm undecided. If this was just a wiki project I would have blocked him for edit warring without hesitation, but... -- Harry Wood 17:02, 5 December 2008 (UTC)
Hi Harry, i see there is a edit war about the smoothness-pages. The page is constantly moving from approved to rejected and back. Maybe the page can be blocked. Chriscf is reverting any change. thx Hadhuey 17:48, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Relief maps

Hi. You were asking about Relief maps. I put up a copy of my tile-overlaying thingy on:

http://dev.openstreetmap.org/~ojw/relief/?zoom=9&lat=54.44155&lon=-2.47096&layers=B

Source code is here (you can adapt that to remove areas identified by some colour out of a map layer, and overlay the result onto some other map)

http://dev.openstreetmap.org/~ojw/relief/source.php

Ojw 21:42, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Hey there...

Hi Harry, thanks for your awesome work inside the OSM wiki! Firefishy just set the admin flag for User:Uboot and me. So it should be a bit easier to get some things tidied up in the German namespace. But of course I'm also available to help with other stuff in other languages. --Avatar 07:16, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Languages templates

Yeah, the idea about the adding of language templates was to remove all the page specific templates, but turned out to be more work than I had initially imagined. I will continue it as I have time, but have received a larger workload at work now, so it might go slow. --Skippern 11:14, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Re: two-phase mapping workflow

What I do is add the ways as 'unclassified road' with no name. Then Cloudname's 'minutely updated tiles' will highlight the unnamed streets. I then walk the area on foot and make sure to walk the whole length of a street when adding its name, so I can add footways, post boxes, pubs and so on. (In fact I usually visit the area on foot twice, not bothering with the Yahoo imagery unless to check the outline of a building or where the GPS trace is noisy.) -- Ed Avis <eda@waniasset.com>

Towns or Town

I've seen your name on the wiki a lot and noticed that you've changed a few categories from things like "UK towns" to "Town in UK" etc (which is why I'm posting here). I started looking at how towns (and cities) where categorised and also updated the places category (partly to answer something on the talk page and partly to stop one of the categories this template allocates pages to being hidden); when I started I went down the "Towns in UK" route as this was what I saw on a number of pages (and a couple of requests on talk pages). Searching the wiki didn't suggest a standard. I've updated a fair number of the UK pages this way. However, as I've gone further it is obvious that other systems are in use (which is where I came across your name). Do you know if there is an agreed standard as to whether it should be "Towns in UK", "Town in UK" or "UK Town" or something else? (same for cities). I'm happy to update the pages as necessary to try and make it all consistent. --MarkS 19:31, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Haven't paid much attention to these categories in a while. As I said over at Template talk:Place#Categories... good work Mark! -- Harry Wood 15:14, 27 May 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply. Since I posted somebody else has used Towns. I'll go with the plural and more importantly try to make sure everything is updated and it is clear what we are using. --MarkS 13:55, 29 May 2009 (UTC)


Cairo Mapping Party

Thanks so much for your help and encouragement :) See you at SOTM!

Slippy Map MediaWiki Extension (add cycle map)

Hi, do you help me with add cycle map to extension? You are author of extension and I have not knowledge with development in OSM SVN. I read PHP and make change class old new diff. How long is way to change in OSM mediawiki? Do you help me with add this "patch"? It is change correct? thanks! hanoj 21:18, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Yep. checked-in and deployed! -- Harry Wood 11:18, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Great, thanks. In my town we says: "Impossible promptly, miracles in 3 days!" -- hanoj 14:42, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

about your post in renderers articles

i read your comment on this article [6] there is 2 month ago. You say " somebody who didn't really understand the difference between comparing rendering software, and comparing available map layers" .

  • 1 Could you explain more what you ohave in mind by say that.
  • 2 Is there rendering engine that support output in both raster and vector . Mean in web side if browser can rendering vector and raster data ?
  • 3 Do you have in mind that there is a difference beetween stylesheet use for each layer and layer in final map?
  • 4 Layers could be "planified " to one layers in a raster tiles ?( vector to raster engine)
  • 5 wanted to update the articles with my limited knowledge . what could be the focus point to be enhanced in this article
  • 6 in which article end user could find link information about joomla and osm [7]
  • 7 when you say rendering software Does you think about engine ? so where must go the capture screen of template stylesheet map ? is there a chapter article about raster stylesheet / vector stylesheet ? most raster come from vector isn't it ?

I find the article about renderers not very informatives about the technology use , the data in input and the final output result . speak about geocoding or routing is not about rendering and think should disseppear !! . some information miss because seem under licence.


Thank's France-59-valenciennes 12:13, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

The page as originally gave a clear list of different rendering software: Mapnik,Osmarender (the main ones) and various less used systems: Kosmos, CartoType, Cobra, osmrender.pl, Pyrender, PHP rendering, Phprender.
A list of available map layers or different "styles" might be interesting too for some people, but it's going to be a much longer list. 'Cycle map' and 'Mapnik' layers look very different, but they are both created by the same rendering software, Mapnik. There are *many* different map styles, and some systems such as the CloudMade style editor which make it easy to create more, so the list is effectively infinite.
Also if you want to a page to compare map styles, don't use JPEG images, which create lossy artefacts near the labels, and don't display the large images side-by-side. The wiki page gets a horizontal scrollbar (even on my massive monitor) which is all a bit messy.
That's what I was meaning.
-- Harry Wood 17:03, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Need help against unapproved changes on highway key

Hi Harry,

I know you oppose tags with subjective values. Please help me to avoid the recent changes by Dieterdreist on the description on the highway tag. (change from physical to importance)

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php?title=Key:highway&action=history

Thanks. --Lulu-Ann 12:41, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

eugh! Haven't had time to wade into this debate yet. -- Harry Wood 13:50, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Single sign on

Hi Harry,

you removed the notice about the OpenID plugin for the forum from Single_sign_on. I wonder whether this makes sense, given the fact that it was located in the OpenID section. If you should decide at some point in the future to use OpenID for integration, you would have to use it for each piece of software, including the forum and despite it using another database for authentication already. So, in my opinion, either remove the whole OpenID section because you have already chosen another approach, or leave it intact in case you might want to take this road.

--Webmeischda 16:31, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Well they way I see it, the only reason OpenID is ever mentioned in a discussion about single-sign-on, is because it provides a quick and dirty zero coding solution which would get us part way there (users could use one user name and password across all OSM apps, but they would still have to log in to them all separately and other messy aspects) ...but that's all solved already for the forum, so... yeah we might want OpenId eventually on there too, but that's not relevant to single sign-on.
OpenId could be a good idea for OSM for other reasons but fans of OpenID should hold off for a few months to give the OAuth changes some time to bed in. OAuth adds new opportunities and new complications to OSM authentication. If we start talking about OpenID any time soon, this will muddy the waters.
-- Harry Wood 12:49, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Tracking Progress

I just responded to your message on [Talk:Addis_Ababa/Yahoo]. Do you watch that page anyways already? :) --Alexm 09:49, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

  • What is your opinion on the new approach, to track with relations? The good thing is, that they are well visualizable and offer more flexibility in areas with different complexity (many streets, only forest..) --Alexm 09:33, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Meadow tags docs

I've just answered your message about my creation of the tag:natural=meadow wiki page, and why it wasnt on the Key:landuse page See Talk:Tag:natural=meadow --Jamicu 20:48, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Converting between formats

i remove the duplicate data . all the item are in the Converting between formats article. many row have ? and blank cell France-59-valenciennes 01:27, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

India

Hi Harry,I mainly working on [8].We are working for more collaboration between Wikipedia and OSM. We are tring to mark all national expressways, national highways and state highways in India, which major part of the roads in India. So in later stage Wikipedia can use slippy image extension----Naveenpf 15:46, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

PL namespace

Hi! Can you look at this request? And second thing: is it possible to get admin rights here? OSM Wiki is a bit messy, I'm admin in Wikipedia, so I know what to do :). Regards, Yarl ✉ 21:23, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Data are/is

Sorry to be pedantic, I know there are different camps on is/are. I don't feel strongly, but do reflexively edit. Jumbanho 17:35, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Localisation Links in the Left Side Bar

Links in the SideBar with 'not EN' National settings links lead to Main_Page, but must lead to xx:Main_Page Do you know way to localising links in SideBar? May be you can made localisable links for all national, non-english users?
Also neeed to localise other links in Left Side Bar: 

'xx:Main_Page' unstead Main_Page 
'Special:RecentChanges/xx' unstead 'Special:RecentChanges'
'RU:Main_Page&uselang=xx' unstead 'Main_Page'
'yyyyyyyyyyyyy' unstead 'Mapping_projects'
'xx:Map_Features&uselang=ru' unstead 'Map_Features'
'xx:Help:Contents&uselang=ru' unstead 'Help:Contents'

Can you fix it for all National pages? --Calibrator 09:18, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't know of an easy way of fixing sidebar links to do this. We'd have to do a little hack in the wiki code I think. -- Harry Wood 09:36, 15 October 2009 (UTC)
Good News!
When translating messages with wfMsg(), it is not always clear what should be considered UI messages and what should be content messages. For example, for the English Wikipedia, there should be only one 'mainpage', so when getting the link for 'mainpage', we should treat it as site content and call wfMsgForContent(), but for rendering the text of the link, we call wfMsg(). The code behaves this way by default. However, sites like the Wikimedia Commons do offer different versions of 'mainpage' and the like for different languages. This array provides a way to override the default behavior.
In accordance with http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgForceUIMsgAsContentMsg, it need change only one string in LocalSettings.php file. Never edit DefaultSettings.php; copy appropriate lines to LocalSettings.php instead and amend them as appropriate.
$wgForceUIMsgAsContentMsg = array();
change to
$wgForceUIMsgAsContentMsg = array( 'mainpage-url', 'portal-url', 'mapfeatures-url', 'helppage' );
Can you do it? --Calibrator 17:22, 16 October 2009 (UTC)
Anybody home? One month this problem exist. But it can be resolve in 5 minutes! Change string please in DefaultSettings.php or LocalSettings.php file. --Calibrator 12:52, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
Please see Talk:Wiki#Russian SideBar have links to English pages -- Harry Wood 17:29, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
Now enabled wgForceUIMsgAsContentMsg. Some language pages need fixes. --Firefishy 18:23, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Sysop

Hi! I want to add some tools for wiki. Page Mediawiki:Editools is blocked, but I want to add this code :


<div class="plainlinks" style="margin-top:1px;border-width:1px;border-style:solid;border-color:#aaaaaa;padding:5px;"> <small> <charinsert>{{}} {{{}}} | [] [[]] [[Category:]] #REDIRECT [[]] <strike></strike> {{Tag||}} {{Relation|}} {{node|}} {{way|}} </small> </div>

Thanks --Esperanza 10:16, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Looks like a cool trick. I have some other ideas for things to add there, but maybe we should wait until we move server. All of these things have a small hit on performance for our poor struggling wiki server (in this case, page load time, and query look-ups every time the edit box is shown). Hopefully we'll move soon -- Harry Wood 17:32, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

License change process (OSMF vote for Odbl)

Harry, would it be possible to make the crucial vote about the license change to Odbl more prominent on the wiki ? Like making a header announcement on all wiki pages (or at least on the main wiki page) with a link to the page Open Database License and the possible dead time for the contributors to accept the new license (end of Feb 2010 - still depending on the OSMF vote result). Accidentally, we could also add a link to the opinion poll ([9]), giving an additional chance for contributors to express their opinion. -- Pieren 16:20, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

You're better off talking to User:Firefishy since he is the wiki server admin and also on the License working group -- Harry Wood 16:42, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Extensions

Hi Harry,

Having been going round giving the place a good clean (hopefully, good, anyway) I've come across a number of Extension suggestions in various templates and talk pages. One such being a request for Semantic Wiki. I'de also like to see Extension:InputBox added so i could create some simple "create" pages that loaded up a preload new edit page (unless you know another way to put an input box in a page that asks for a page name then creates a new page at that location with some preloaded text?)?

Whose the best person to ask for these extensions, and what are the chances of getting a response. Equally, whose best to ask regarding CSS edits (some of the templates used in here would be simpler if the CSS was in the main CSS block for the Wiki)?

I'm sure i could do most of this myself, but alas, I'm no admin, so don't have the rights.

Cheers Martin Renvoize 15:44, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

We've been tracking such requests on Talk:Wiki. I can make changes to the CSS (MediaWiki:common.css and MediaWiki:monobook.css) For installing extensions, or any other server admin changes, User:Firefishy is the main man to ask.  :...however we deliberately act slowly on these requests. They always involve trade-offs, often quite subtle. Trade-offs related to server performance, and also trade-offs to do with usability (most importantly the simplicity) of the wiki. -- Harry Wood 20:35, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
Any chance you could add
/* For template documentation */
.template-documentation {
    clear: both;
    margin: 1em 0 0 0;
    border: 1px solid #aaa; 
    background-color: #ecfcf4; 
    padding: 1em;
}
 
.thumbinner {
    min-width: 100px;
}
to MediaWiki:common.css please. It would make template documentation more readable, and answers a few points i've been asked recently in my talk page. Cheers Martin Renvoize 11:59, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Reading through your other talk points, is there a plan to move the wiki to a shiney new server some time soon? Martin Renvoize 19:52, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

yes a move to new wiki hardware will improve performance. It might mean we can introduce other extensions, but mainly its about making the wiki cope better at peak times and serve the big Map Features page more quickly. I'm not sure if the move has happened yet. -- Harry Wood 20:35, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
Cheers for the response Harry, hope you had a good holiday.

Obviously extensions increase overheads, I just wonder if on occasions a well chosen extension may actually streamline the Wiki? The map features page is a slow point in the whole site, and does not help the server load being one of the most frequently visited pages. It's also not especially obvious how it's edited/created and who maintains it. I'm not sure, but I would guess that a Semantic wiki extension would allow a more dynamic page of this type, spreading load through the day instead of requesting lots of templates and expensive procedure calls at peek times?

Whitewater maps proposal

Also, Please see, WikiProject Whitewater Maps/Proposals, and comment? Martin Renvoize 15:39, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Away on holiday at the moment, in case you´re wondering why I´m being unresponsive. Will answer your questions soon. -- Harry Wood 22:47, 1 January 2010 (UTC)
I shall take a look and comment over there -- Harry Wood 20:35, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Great! We should meet up for a pint some time, would be interesting to put a face to the name. Your London based still right? Have you got a new job yet, I'm still on the job search having finished uni last September. Probably the main reason on around here so often, helps keep me sane while rattling off applications.

MediaWiki:Common.js

Hi, can you add some code to MediaWiki:Common.js? It's part of {{Navbox}}, from en.wiki. I see that some code is already in common.js but collapsing is still not working. Code is below in comment. Yarl ✉ 16:11, 1 March 2010 (UTC)


Bad names

How hard would it be to scan for names with semicolons, rather than just long names? --NE2 17:49, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

For Project of the week/2010/May 02 you mean? I don't actually have a script for finding objects with long names at all. User:Rw did that bit. I fed his list of objects from the wiki page into my php script db. I can add other objects to the list if you want to give me a list of ids. -- Harry Wood 20:02, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Icon pages

Hi, with your permission I would like to refactor Map Icons and related pages like Proposed Icons, WikiProject Pictograms and add my knowledge that I collected during this project of this week. --!i! 06:10, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

Yep. I think it's a good idea. The main thing that is needed, is an update to show all the different places where people are building iconsets. You need to be clear in the descriptions that, while coordination is a good idea, people will always go off and do their own thing with this, and that goes for people running renderers to use the icons too. If you make lots of icons, there's no guarantee that anyone will use them (and certainly no guarantee that they'll be used on the front page map)
Just be clear on one thing though... You don't need to ask my permission, or anyone else's permission before editing the wiki (I'll usually have an opinion, but I'm not in charge or anything) It's maybe important to figure who cares most about the page you want to change, and discuss things with them. In this case you can see in the history of the 'Map Icons' page that the page was largely set up by User:Ulf, so you might want to chat to him about it... although he's not in charge either.
-- Harry Wood 07:20, 31 July 2010 (UTC)
Well yes Harry you are right, but IMHO is it a question of polliteness and of good planning to ask the ones that worked on that page. I tried to ask as much people as possible. --!i! 06:22, 4 August 2010 (BST)

Moving Neat Stuff

Hi Harry, after cleaning I would like to move Neat Stuff either to Software/Unusual or Software/Other what do you prefer? --!i! 08:30, 20 August 2010 (BST)

What todo with Homebrew Page

Hi Harry, I outsourced the apps from Making_Tracks_with_Homebrew-ware so this is only a barebone anymore. But there are some hints and commands esp. for Linux. Do you have an idea where we could move this infos? I would like to make this page just to a redirect to Software. --!i! 08:21, 28 August 2010 (BST)

User:JohnSmith

Excert from my talk at Firefishy's talk page:

I feel User:JohnSmith's behaviour is bordering close up to vandalism, where he is reverting all attempts of getting progress in tags he have created. I am not sure how to bring this up. --Skippern 00:28, 29 August 2010 (BST)

Hi Skippern, can you post any examples? -- Firefishy 00:46, 29 August 2010 (BST)
shop=dive shop=deli shop=bed etc there are a whole dictionary of shop tags where he is reverting all attempts on edits --Skippern 02:51, 29 August 2010 (BST)
I see. Would you mind raising this with Harry Wood instead? I am too closely involved with the licensing debate with John Smith to comfortably get involved. -- Firefishy 03:09, 29 August 2010 (BST)

Is it anything you can do to help? --Skippern 03:49, 29 August 2010 (BST)

Landuse=wood

Was there any reason that you decided to remove all useful content from the landuse=wood page?

It was created back here: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2009-April/035853.html following a discussion on the mailing list which reached no agreement on how forests/woods should be tagged, but did agree that people were free to use their own tags.

Was this a unilateral decision? If so, it's effectively vandalism. Did you ask the original or subsequent authors of the page whether they felt it now no longer serves its purpose? Did you even bother to check the mailing lists for discussions?

SomeoneElse 12:28, 13 October 2010 (BST)

"Was there any reason" Well yes and I've gone to great lengths to extensively explain the reasons on the Tag:landuse=wood page. Have you read the page? Have you seen the discussion on Talk:Tag:landuse=wood?
"Did you ask the original or subsequent authors of the page". Yes. On Talk:Tag:landuse=wood. There's only one original author User:sward, and it seems he couldn't really remember why he thought it was a good idea to create the page.
If you follow through all the reasoning laid out there, I'd hope you would agree that landuse=wood is a "mistake tag" and we should move away from using it. Let us know your thoughts on the matter over at Talk:Tag:landuse=wood.
-- Harry Wood 13:13, 13 October 2010 (BST)

Did you even read the mailing list discussion that I linked to above? I don't think that a conversation between 3 wiki "editors" counts as an extensive discussion. SomeoneElse 12:06, 14 October 2010 (BST)

That's from April 2009. I can't actually see the full thread in the archive there for some reason. Anyway In June 2010 User:sward (Simon Ward? same guy I suppose) discussed things with me on Talk:Tag:landuse=wood.
I'm sorry if you felt that the discussion wasn't inclusive enough. I do a lot of work tidying things up and sorting out tag documentation on the wiki. I don't generally hang out on the mailing list. I know there's often missing link between people changing things on the wiki and discussing things on the mailing list, and I know that this sometimes creates problems. This was part of the reason why I went to great lengths leave behind a extensively explained rationale rather than just deleting the page.
Talk:Tag:landuse=wood is a pretty good place for discussion of the tag documentation we have on that wiki page. A discussion was actually kicked off my Frederick who observed that this (completely stupid) tag was documented and added to map features without a great deal of prior discussion. This has created a LOT of confusion, which is a shame.
Anyway I'd recommend you join in on Talk:Tag:landuse=wood because you're just messaging me directly here, but I don't really understand how your viewpoint fits in with what's been said there. I take it you think the tag is a good idea.
-- Harry Wood 14:12, 14 October 2010 (BST)

User Blocks

I've fixed the IP Block feature when blocking a user. This only effects NEW account created after this message. Checking the "Automatically block the last IP..." box will block the user's IP address for 24 hours. -- Firefishy 15:18, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for Softare details

Hi Harry, thanks for adding more details to the software pages. Unfortunatly I hadn't the time to check out the single tools. --!i! This user is member of the wiki team of OSM 14:52, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Yep well I think it's an important follow up task which somebody should do, to at least add a single sentence in the main content area on every one of these pages. You don't necessarily need to research any extra facts about the software. Just a top sentence of the form:
'''title''' ([http://link]) is an [[Android]] app {{stub}}
Quite a trivial thing to keep somebody occupied. I've already worked through the bottom half of the Android page.
-- Harry Wood 15:06, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Distributary

In the talk page I put the link that you asked. Thanks in advance. --Pertile 23:45, 9 April 2011 (BST)

Spammers?

Can you help? I'm pretty sure http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Jeno is all spam. Should I let someone know about the problematic user? I didn't find an answer by searching. TIA MJR 01:21, 14 May 2011 (BST)

Thanks. I've blocked the account and seems the spam has already been reverted. Best to add these reports in future to the Spam page. -- Firefishy 10:46, 14 May 2011 (BST)
OK, thanks. I didn't do that because there wasn't a section on the Spam page for them. MJR 08:58, 16 May 2011 (BST)

Signatures on stats talk page

I think that everything is now attributed. Thanks for doing the sig-patrol; I think it is quite important to get down who requested/contributed what in talk. --Ceyockey 01:50, 4 August 2011 (BST)

Native languages page names

The Russian user Dr&mx is moving all translated pages of the RU: namespace to (partly) native language names. I tried to talk with him but he refuses to answer in English. He is also marking all his changes as "minor edit" and writing none or Russian edit summaries. Also have a look at his edits in the User: namespace! What should I do now? --phobie m d 00:11, 9 August 2011 (BST)

Openlayers simple example

I've added two extensions which hopefully are useful - how to restrict bounds and zoom levels (very useful for deploying a local slippymap), and how to fix the (awful) default style/location of the attribution text & scalebar.

If you think these should be booted off to subsidiary pages, then feel free!

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenLayers_Simple_Example#Restricting_the_bounds_.26_zoom_levels

--RichardMann 20:51, 17 August 2011 (BST)

Cool. sounds like useful additional examples. I think will take a look at this some time and maybe split examples onto more different pages yes. -- Harry Wood 23:53, 17 August 2011 (BST)


Schreib Deutsch, wenn angeblich Deutsch kannst. Ist ohnehin eine schönere Sprache als das englische.

Wiki purposes @ wikiproject cleanup

Thanks for your input at Talk:WikiProject Cleanup#Wiki purposes - asking for clarification. --Ceyockey 22:01, 10 September 2011 (BST)

Board membership

Harry -- Should I add your name to the table on Humanitarian_OSM_Team/Board_Elections considering your being named a member of the board in Mikel's email http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/hot/2011-November/001146.html ? --Ceyockey 23:20, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

...hmm, let me clarify. At present the table appears to be targeted to nominations. However, there is not a listing of all the current board members outside of the nominations process. That was what I was getting at, actually - the addition of a current board listing. --Ceyockey 23:23, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Changing user name

Hi, I would change my user name here. Who is the "admin" that could do this? --Madeco 11:36, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

cache/spam

About our SPAM edit war, I'm prety sure you must have had a bad cache or something because I Couldn't see any Vitamin D spam on Pierens page.. I know it's not much use to discuss it now, but http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Pieren/diary/15082 really was clean the first time I looked. Erik Johansson 13:14, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

I see it cleared up now, but yes I could've been seeing it from a cache somewhere when I reverted you I guess. It was a comment with the word "Vitamid D" hyperlinked, but the text of the comment was such that it might've been easy to miss. A generic friendly message. Don't remember the exact text.
If it *was* still present then that would mean whatever mechanism the sysadmins used to delete the spammy user, it did not remove the user's spammy comment. Makes me wonder if there's many other spammy comments being not removed. Most spam seems to be diary entries, but we should link to the actual comment when we spot spam comments, so we can check this.
-Harry Wood 15:13, 24 January 2012 (UTC)
No there was definitely no friendly message there.. :-) Erik Johansson 15:28, 25 January 2012 (UTC)
Yeah probably I was just seeing a cache then. Sorry for the confusion. I've just looked up the keyboard shortcut for doing a full refresh on mac safari. That might help :-) (I've moved onto a mac recently) -- Harry Wood 16:22, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

mkgmap now supports address search

Hello Harry,

maybe you want to add the news that mkgmap is now able to create Garmin maps supporting address search? This feature was desperately requested by lots of Garmin users. What do you think? --WanMil 18:22, 27 January 2012 (UTC)

Sounds like good news! But d'you have a link to more information? I was expecting to find it on the blog on http://mkgmap.org.uk Can't even find a mention of it in the mailing list archive here -- Harry Wood 10:38, 28 January 2012 (UTC)
Seems like Steve has read this. There is now a new entry in the blog. I have asked Steve to add a link to a wiki page that describes a little bit more exactly what has to be done to compile a map. --WanMil 18:10, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Armchair Mapping Page

Moved to Talk:Armchair mapping

Wiki namespace and i18n

Hi Harry. I know you are involved in the wiki maintenance. I would like to invite you in this discussion here about someone using lower case language prefix for the translated wiki pages. Thanks. --Pieren 11:37, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Tag:waterway=riverbank

Ooops, my mistake, I shortcuted my mind to think osmarender tools = service. Good revert, sorry. sletuffe 14:18, 23 May 2012 (BST)

Translations

Hello, as you're part of the Wiki team you should be interested: I think that translation on this wiki would use some improvement and I've proposed a new system at Talk:Wiki Translation#Translate extension. I hope you can provide some feedback and thoughts (and help if we decide to go that way). Thanks, Nemo 10:37, 16 August 2012 (BST)

Thank you!

Hello Harry Wood!

I really have to thank you for the correction. In Slovenia we are really beginers and have learned during the translation how to edit the page. So I muss admit, this was really nice to have support from other to correct our mistakes.

Greatings from Slovenia (now from Turkey, where we learn to map OSM better)!

Sergeja

Cleaning up the wiki

Please take part in this discussion :) --★ → Airon 90 12:58, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Saarburg Mapping Photo

Hi Harry,

I added some words [[10]] Is it ok for you ... or do you need more?

5 young turkish ladies mapping in Turkey

Hi Harry, http://www.facebook.com/manfred.reiter1/posts/119947298177295?comment_id=87946&notif_t=like

5 students, here teacher and a Comenius teacher mapping in Turkey :) and they found the track on a Garmin.

interested for a photo of the week? I can deliver names and geolocation. :-)

cheers

Manfred aka Fredao

Oh that link doesn't work. Maybe because I'm not friends with you. I've friend requested you. -- Harry Wood (talk) 16:42, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

upps sorry, I think we must tune the side ;-) -- User:Fredao 18:43, 5 February 2013‎

Ah yes. I see it now. Great picture!
It's best if you, or the person who took the photo, can upload it to the wiki and state which license the image is released with (recommend CC-BY-SA 2.0 or just "public domain") But let me know if you need help doing that.
-- Harry Wood (talk) 17:28, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
(Uploaded (File:T garmin.jpg)
If CC-BY-NC is possible ok, if not it can be CC-BY-SA 2.0 :) -- User:Fredao 18:43, 5 February 2013‎
Well I think it's allowed on the wiki but for Featured Images we would like these to be open and re-useable, and so we are disallowing "non-commercial" restrictions there (some background on that). We're not expecting massively exploitative commercial uses of these images, but restricting commercial use is problematic. I hope it's OK I've gone ahead and put a CC-BY-SA 2.0 label on there (File:T garmin.jpg) -- Harry Wood (talk) 10:45, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
And we need to know what's going on in the picture. A description, which I can help turn into a snappy caption. Then I'm sure we can have it as image of the week!
-- Harry Wood (talk) 17:28, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
from left to right: students: Şeyma, Kader, Neslihan,(teachers: Manfred, Miray) Simge, Özge
Our project aims to tackle the issue of gender-stereotyping. Students from Karacabey, Turkey,
learning how to use a tracking device (Garmin) to improve OSM in Turkey.
The girls were tracking about the ways nearby the waterfall which named Suuçtu.
The picture was taken at a leisure=picnic next the waterall and not in the City of Sarnıckoy. :)
The turkish students saw the track on the OSM map and marked the picnic place, the parking and will transfer it via JOSM to OSM.
-- User:Fredao 18:43, 5 February 2013‎

Text from Necdet ... I added the main items to my descrition from 5th February :) ... And in the text above I corrected the location. (I have the track and the waypoints. ;-) )

Hi Harry, First of all i feel so excited that one of the picture of our project which was taken in Turkey, will be the image of the week :) The picture was taken in a village of Mustafakemalpasa,Bursa,Turkey. The name of the village is Sarnıckoy. The girls were tracking about the ways nearby the waterfall which named Suuçtu. Of course with the help of their guide Manfred ;) Thank you so much for your contribution. Necdet

4 students from Azores Islands travelled to Germany to have a OSM Training

http://bit.ly/XYueQi if you are interested - I can give you more info in english

cheers Manfred

Another corker! Ive added here Featured image proposals#Angra do Heroísmo Azores -- Harry Wood (talk) 09:59, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

No image of the week, this week?

I can only see Template:Iotw image/2013-11 ;-)

Nice move!

Hi Harry,

Sorry for having misplaced a comment some months ago on the main page, I didn't realize that I was not editing the right page...

I already noticed that on this Wiki, just after logging in, the user was redirected to the main page instead of the last visited one! thus my modification at the wrong place, editing a bit too fast through browser tabs. (I don't know if this behaviour still occurs...)

Erhhh... I haven't found back which article I was commenting on, but you did it, thanks a lot! I promise not doing the same mistake once more in the future. Teuxe (talk) 17:34, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

S'allright. Hopefully you'll get a reply there now hey? :-) -- Harry Wood (talk) 17:59, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

Wiki admin : I cannot move a page

I cannot move the page FR:Tag:tourism=alpine hut to FR:Tag:tourism=alpine_hut (notice the underscore instead of space). wikimedia tells me that I cannot move a page to itself ! Could you do something as wiki admin ? --Pieren (talk) 12:28, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

OK fixed that for you. The wiki page is at the correct name and doesn't need to be moved, it's just there was a problem with DISPLAYTITLE. This directive should be set automatically by the template Template:Fr:ValueDescription but you've uncovered a little bug there which I've just fixed. -- Harry Wood (talk) 13:19, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
Thanks. --Pieren (talk) 13:47, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Notes

Hi. I've seen that you started the page about the new notes feature. This diary entry tells me that a section is probably missing there for the contributors trying to close the "notes". Could you add a small section (your english is better than mine) for the contributors, about "communication" and "control", etc. Or maybe a link forward to another page explaining what to add or not (privacy, verifiable, copyrighted marterial, etc) ? Pieren (talk) 13:47, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Talk:Typhoon_Haiyan

Hey mate, could you please(!) (but no hurry) have a look at Talk:Typhoon_Haiyan? First asking for support and then not catering for the volunteers seems to be not useful for me. ;-) --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 01:52, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! :-) The intro message seems to be a good idea. --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 13:29, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Approved but forgotten proposal re whitewater tagging?

Hi, I am clueless about this - hope you have an idea? The proposal would significantly impact the established tagging of whitewater features, it seems to have been approved although I am not at all sure it met the formal requirements (minimum vote count). Now it awaits "cleanup". Stumbled on it when creating waterfalls in OSM. RicoZ (talk) 22:27, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

iotw for week 52 (2013)

Hello Harry
Please comment on the Ballonmap-with-OpenLayers-Proposal. The description in en and de would be ready.
Happy Xmas! --LordOfMaps (talk) 17:02, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment and for your iotw! :) --LordOfMaps (talk) 19:02, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
But why is there no iotw-template-page? --LordOfMaps (talk) 19:12, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
Do you mean the stuff which I mentioned in Talk:Featured_image_proposals#Optimum_time_line_of_IOTW_discussion_and_decision? --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 21:56, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
Sorry that wasn't expressed well. I meant the {{featured date|2013|52}} on the file page you have added this night. --LordOfMaps (talk) 09:04, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
It just was forgotten, I guess. Feel free to add it if you find a featured image without it. --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 12:04, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Where should I report spam-Users for blocking?

like: User:Kuzhuzhu
--LordOfMaps (talk) 08:13, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Usually spammers seem to create a new page for their spam, so you did the right thing in that case. Use Template:Delete on the spam page. This means that the wiki admins will see it pretty soon, and they will delete the page and also block the user.
Blocking the user can be important, but normally not so much, because spammers do a one-hit registration, then spam, and that user never comes back. A more unusual situation would be where a spammer is editing an existing page repeatedly with spam. Obviously in this case it's important to block them. You could list them on the Spam page to flag that up.
There's a few admin people who are quite attentive about wiki spam, but maybe less so over the Christmas period.
-- Harry Wood (talk) 11:36, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Key:postal_code revert

You're right. It "doesn't make sense to link completely different tag docs in a sentence about [that] tag."
But why did you delete the added See also section? --LordOfMaps (talk) 18:39, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Apologies. I didn't mean to revert that bit.
Anyway I've just rewritten the top bit of Key:postal_code to hopefully be a bit clearer and include instructions on when to use Tag:boundary=postal_code
-- Harry Wood (talk) 19:39, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

thanks also for the small bits!

Grammar checking with explanation, super! Thanks, mate! --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 23:33, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Native English speaker needed

Hi
We need the help of a native English speaker like you for a new tag-value: How would you call a person which comes to an emergency ward on its own / not in an ambulance? See: Talk:Proposed_features/Tag:emergency=emergency_ward_entrance#emergency_ward_entrance=private_persons
Thanks --LordOfMaps (talk) 10:58, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

Unificação no prefixo Pt — Você é a favor ou contra?

Olá Harry Wood!

Você usa português neste wiki e por isso está sendo convocado para a importante discussão sobre a unificação no prefixo Pt.

Alexandre Magno (talk) 00:33, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

oh yeah. I remember a very old discussion about that... I've dug it out and linked it from there. - Harry Wood (talk) 04:32, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

reorganisation of this wiki's navigation

Hello, I write to you because you are part of the Wiki Team. I would like to establish a navigation concept for this wiki, lead by use cases. I wrote an example main page and an example navigation page (for the use case 'contribute map data'). In January, I wrote a correspendent proposal on Talk:Wiki_organisation, with some but not much feedback. I would be happy if you could add your feedback in order to decide either to refuse the proposal or to proceed. In the latter case I will incorporate all feedback, write the two missing navigation pages ('about' and 'use') and finally I would like to change the main page. Best wishes, --Cantho (talk) 07:20, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Now I proposed to apply the proposed changes to the main page. Your feedback/ vote is welcome. If you want to respond but don't have the time right now, please give a notice about when you think you can respond. Have a nice day --Cantho (talk) 10:12, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
Hello Harry Wood, after one month of vote nine people supported the proposal, one person was neutral (given reason: no time to go into detail) and nobody oposed it. The last vote is three weeks ago. I think, the proposal is ready to go online. There were some (smaller) suggestions, as there will always be, but I think it's good to implement the changes as they were proposed and voted on, and then people can continue on improvements if they want. I don't have the right to change the main page, can you please do the change? Have a nice day --Cantho (talk) 20:22, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
It would be nice to get this out this weekend if you have a spare few minutes. --RobJN (talk) 11:46, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Czech localization of Main SideBar

Hello, could you please change the translation of the Czech (cs) version of the Side bar on the main wiki page?

  • Main Page URL - Cs:Main_Page
  • The map TEXT - Mapa
  • Map Feaures TEXT - Legenda mapy
  • Map Features URL Cs:Map_Features
  • Contributors TEXT - Přispěvatelé
  • Blogs TEXT - Blogy
  • Shop TEXT - Obchod
  • Donations TEXT - Příspěvky
  • Donations URL - Cs:Donations

' Thank you. Chrabros (talk) 06:47, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

OK. I had a go at doing that. Not sure if it's all correct. The 'Příspěvky' link doesn't seem to pick up on the Cs:Donations value in MediaWiki:Sitesupport-url/cs for example. -- Harry Wood (talk) 10:20, 15 April 2014 (UTC)
Hi, thank you. The 'Donations' ('Příspěvky') link really points to Donations instead of Cs:Donations. But I really do not know why. But it is much better than it was. :-) Chrabros (talk) 08:09, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

Tile usage policy revert

You did revert the addition I made (a new item in the list "Setting up your own tile server": * ProxySimplePHP5, a proxy written in PHP caching other tile servers") for following reasons: remove that addition. It's a list of top three recommendations. Besides caching proxies don't actually solve our server strain all that well. I don't see the first point (it's an unlimited list, to keep it small is OK, but I haven't added 100 items). "that well", is it a point of view or a fact based on some observations? In the use case I have, having a cache than expires every 2 hours (as it is by default if I remember right) or of let's say 1 month (in the case of TMS, it's a background image, the objects put on the top (POI for instance) are more important, in my specific use case, the end user is looking at more or less predefined areas where the POI are located).

So in that case changing the validity period should really help, or did I miss some point?

IMO, it's OK to keep it outside the list as "secondary choice": improving the server load some how is better than not at all, isn't it? And if you want to reserve this second choice to some use case, it's OK too. --Nospam2005 (talk) 20:25, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

The thing is that page should probably be locked really because it's an official policy page. The sysadmins wrote it, and use it to link people to. They're not really inviting lots of new ideas to be added to that page.
I reckon this addition is a bit so-so, and if we add that then lots of other folks will expect to see their pet projects added to the list of suggestions. It's that kind of problem. But I don't really feel all that strongly about it. Why don't you move this discussion to the Talk:Tile usage policy page? and we'll see what the actual authors of the policy think
-- Harry Wood (talk) 22:58, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
yes, an official policy page should be locked and only the discussion page should be unlocked. I moved the discussion as suggested to Talk:Tile_usage_policy#Alternative OpenStreetMap_Tile_Providers
Feel free to remove this discussion from here.
--Nospam2005 (talk) 18:08, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

Documentation template on redirect pages

Please reconsider this old revert . Documentation templates can be useful on redirect pages because the iD editor and taginfo still read them (example on taginfo). Though I don't think they were around when you reverted that. --Jgpacker (talk) 17:13, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

Aha I see. Reverted my revert! -- Harry Wood (talk) 17:43, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

Fix of Main Page

As figured out in Talk:Main_Page#Unbalanced_tag, there's a fix to be done on Main Page, the same as already done on the old proposal. Could you add the fix to Main Page? Thanks --Cantho (talk) 20:16, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Suggestion: Favicon for the wiki

Alexandre Magno (talk) 14:01, 30 July 2014 (UTC)

Bengali localization of Main SideBar

Hello, could you please add the translation for the bengali (bn) version of the Side bar on the main page?

--Aftab (talk) 13:57, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

DONE. Thanks for the translations! -- Harry Wood (talk) 14:05, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

NaviGPS and StorageDepot - Merachndise

Hi Harry, you made some edits there, you may be knowing the current state. Please have a look at the warning banner which I have inserted into Merchandise#Storage_Depot. At least the "NaviGPS" is not anymore available there (and is quite an old gpsr). --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 14:48, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Map-url

Hi Harry, some requests based on MediaWiki talk:Sidebar. Could you please change MediaWiki:Map-url to //www.openstreetmap.org/? (and check if the link still works afterwards). This would preserve the current protocol of the visitor. Currently we send them to http always.

And some more:

Thank you! --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 22:06, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

OK Done those things. And the protocol relative URLs seem to work ok there. Thanks for spotting them -- Harry Wood (talk) 09:54, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

The relative links work for me too. Thanks for the first batch. Some are not done yet (or did you intentionally not change them?). Missing ones follow:

Thank you! --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 15:07, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks again, only the first one is missing (unobvious correction). By the way: page difference views always show "no difference" for me. Even if I am not logged-in and in another browser and in other languages (e.g. &uselang=es) and with JavaScript turned on or off. Must be a coincidence... --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 19:09, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

Great, thanks! :-) Also the diff view works again (seems I was not the only one). --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 13:15, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Images to Commons

Hi Harry, I saw, that you uploaded a photo from Buenos Aires. It would be possible to load it directly to WikiCommons instead of here. I sa woo that you are user on Commons. So all wikis have the possibilities to use it from Commons. regards and a happy new year from Austria K@rl (talk) 18:33, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

overseen? ;-) --regards K@rl (talk) 13:14, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Of course it's open licensed on here, so anybody could take the image in into commons now, but yeah I suppose I should upload things to commons more often.
I have lingering doubts. What images belong on commons? Are they interested in all my funny mapping illustration photos I've put on this wiki? If not, do I have to deal with deletion police there if can't justify the image in some way? I'm pretty sure the answer to these questions is that commons is pretty relaxed and they let people dump all sorts of images on there without a quality/usefulness threshold... however the fact that these question linger in the back of mind... that's the reason I would tend to just upload images here. Often with wiki editing here, I'm trying to get stuff done quickly without too much hassle, because there's so much needs doing on this wiki, I can do without adding extra steps.
...but yeah I suppose I should upload things to commons.
-- Harry Wood (talk) 13:40, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Sorry for my bad english ;-) Commons is of interest for all wikis on the world not only wikmedia projects. On Commons you have not restrictions of relevance or size and so on. And you cannot say, which interest of one of the thousends wikis have :-) - otherwise you can write in the uploaded file, that you are an OSM suer and so you are advertising for this project :-) - To the licenses: All they are free mostly CC BY-SA but also GNU or PD are possible dependant from your sense. --regards from an User of WikiCommons K@rl (talk) 14:05, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Flagpole proposal edits

Hi Harry, you undid my archiving of the flagpole proposal. I assume that was not your intention? --Tordanik 12:22, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Ah yes. Sorry I got confused because somebody linked me to an old version of the page. I've just redone that. This makes much more sense :-) -- Harry Wood (talk) 12:45, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Category:Image copyrights in Template:Bing image

Hi Harry, you have created Template:Bing image which includes Category:Image copyrights on each use. Could you please create the category page, describe and categorize it? It is not really clear to me what your category should mean. Did you mean a subcategory (e.g. Category:Files including bing aerial imagery) of Category:Files by license instead? The template itself should be added to Category:Media license templates. (Note to self: Template:OSM map data under ODbL should get analogous treatment afterwards) Cheers --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 08:31, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Ah yeah I did that wrong. My idea for "Category:Image copyrights" was to create a category for license label templates. It wasn't meant to be included onto the image pages. Also I didn't create the category because I wasn't sure if we had one for this already. Doesn't look like we do. -- Harry Wood (talk) 17:28, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
Ah, fine! As said, we have such a category for this templates: Category:Media license templates (I just had forgot the ":" which made you not see it in my text above). I think it would fit there (although not perfectly). What do you think about this cat?
I made some clarification edits to Category:Files composed of bing aerial imagery. Now I saw that you also created Category:Files using portions of bing imagery - the same should be done there (I can do that later-on). Also we should at least try to provide a definition of "portion" (rather on Template:Bing image portions) ... or link to a definition. Do you had an idea when you created this template? --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 23:05, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
Cool. Yeah I've moved them to Category:Media license templates
The definition of "portion" here is a tricky thing. As I said on there, the idea is that minor use of bing imagery within an image might mean it's OK for it to be labelled CC-by-sa or some other license. So it's a legal thing, and as with all legal things... it's sort of a grey area :-)
I'm quite sure bing won't care in the slightest either way. I just wanted to make sure that we didn't have a bunch of images incorrectly labelled as open licensed, and at the same time I wanted to make sure that we didn't have somebody getting carried away with policing that. It could be quite problematic to remove the CC licensing on images in some circumstances, and it isn't necessary if the image only makes a more minor use of the imagery. But yeah... define "minor use".
I also did this in part to encourage people to upload bing imagery samples to the wiki because I think this can be extremely useful to explain how to map things e.g. how to work on remote humanitarian mapping projects (This was all triggered by a HOT discussion). But we shouldn't do so without using the nice clear bing label.
-- Harry Wood (talk) 18:40, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
Okay, thanks! Could you please see my changes on Template:Bing image/doc and Template:Bing image portions/doc. I think the "de minimis" explanation is what you were looking for. I have added a link to it. Also did some minor changes to Category:Files composed of bing aerial imagery and Category:Files using portions of bing imagery.
Maybe we should have a more general category / template for "de minimis" images. And in general for non-free images .. uh, I rather stop here. ;-) Forget what I said.
While viewing Category:Files_by_license the titles of those two bing cats seemed not to be really different to me. "composed of" and "using portions" is not that different. What about something like Category:Insignificantly using bing aerial imagery and Category:Not insignificantly using bing aerial imagery (I intentionally did not use "significantly" to make more clear that we like to be careful)? Something where the difference is clearer.
Thanks for those templates! That's good to have! --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 20:48, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
Yeah maybe "de minimis" is what I mean. I'm not sure. To be honest I'm deliberately leaving it vague because I don't know the legal details. I just know that certain kinds of thing are vaguely copyrightable/not copyrightable. I also take some inspiration from wikipedia of course, but one fun thing to note is that the OSM wiki server is in the UK not the US, so the approaches/terminology used to label images on wikipedia are not necessarily applicable here. Can't be bothered to dig any deeper into that myself -- Harry Wood (talk) 02:22, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Hmm, but does much vagueness really help our users. To get those two templates used as intended, I think they need some guideline. The concept of "de minimis" seems to be quite universal in the different countries, although not always named that way. Also in the UK. I assume you are okay with my edits. And, okay, then the category names stay as they are. --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 12:58, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
I think it helps get the wiki as close as a need to be to legal correctness. I would move on to other things. For example every screenshot featuring JOSM software, I don't know if it needs to, but it could mention that the design of the software itself is covered by the GPL license (likewise other software screenshots) It's another template we could make to help explain legalities fully.
We might as well do these things on the wiki, since it's actually pretty easy. But then there's some bigger issues on sites like learnosm.org, which declares itself to be public domain. Look at some of the images on there. Unfortunately there's no "image description page" on other types of site, so it's a harder problem to tackle.
My point is the exact wording of a template about bing is small fry, but I guess you're welcome to worry about it if you want to :-) (the edits you've made look fine by the way)
-- Harry Wood (talk) 16:02, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Okay, I think that I see where you are coming from: You would like to avoid investing too much time in optimizing the bing stuff from 95 to 98 percent of optimality while there is other, more rewarding stuff to do. --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 18:31, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Potlatch 2 merging tool mention

Hi Harry, you had added the P2 merging tool (although is is not included in your edit comment, or did I misunderstand your edit?), which I have removed now. Do you really think it should be listed in this comparison page or do you agree with my move? --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 17:00, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Yeah that was my first introduction of iD onto that page. I was trying to think of some differences between iD and Potlatch 2, and maybe make the point that iD development hasn't quite caught up with some features of Potlatch. Still true. I guess you're removing it because Potlatch 2 merging tool is not well known or used. I suppose that was partly my reason for adding it. But I don't really mind either way. -- Harry Wood (talk) 17:18, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Ah, I see! Yes, I removed it because likely only < 10 people ever used it and it is not not even usable without an own P2 installation (if I understand correctly). Hmm, hard. I gave it a new try. --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 17:35, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Your namespaces edit

Hi, wondering why is that piece of text ([11]) so important to you? If you know of particular problems with namespaces it is imho better to describe the particular problems (and alternative solutions) than placing that piece of disclaimer text there. Also, I dare to disagree - namespaces are used for some very important and frequent features - eg language suffix for key:name and other keys. RicoZ (talk) 16:31, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Without those sentences the Namespace page could give the impression that namespaces are somehow mandatory, and that we can expect every tag we look at to contain a colon character. Unless we explain that most tags in fact do not use namespaces, the page is confusing and wrong.
Maybe you're reading it wrong. The point is, plenty of tags (most tags) do not use namespaces, and those include lots of "important" tags for example highway=residential is an important frequently used tag. It doesn't say that all tags with namespaces are unimportant.
I did also initially write some text describing problems with namespaces.
"In general, the benefits of introducing namespaced keys (more grouping and separation) must always be weighed against the increase in complexity this results in (More complicated text for a mapper to type in. More complex data to look at and work with)" [12]
That text was also deleted and should be reinstated in my opinion. For the time being though, the sentences which I have brought back are simply stating an important fact, that most tags don't use namespaces.
-- Harry Wood (talk) 17:39, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
If you think the previous text was suggestive that namespaces are mandatory for every key that could be probably improved without making it appear like namespaces should be avoided. Also, I would think most people who come to this page probably do not want to invent a new namespace, hence I do not see the need to explain that in the overview.
There is a section someone named "Over-namespacing" which should probably get a better name and describe the problems/tradeoffs of inventing new namespaces. Which is where the other text would fit except that it should describe specific problems and not generalities. "More complicated text for a mapper to type in. More complex data to look at and work with" does not look convincing to me - people are used to presets/completion and it is not immediately obvious how the data is more complex to work with.
Namespaces to me in many cases look like a workaround for various situations where the key=value schema does not fit. I have seen much worse workarounds and those situations seem to be abundant.RicoZ (talk) 22:30, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
"That could be probably improved without making it appear like namespaces should be avoided". Well with this text I was trying to be pretty neutral and sticking to the facts. But I am also addressing what I perceive to be a opinion bias of the page. The bit at the top where we're defining what a namespace is, needs to say something along those lines otherwise it is misleading. Namespaces are not the norm. In the absence of those sentences, the page reads like it was written by people who are on a mission to introduce namespaces to more of our tagging. I don't believe that is a reflection of the direction the wider mapping community wants to go in. But you're right I should also use the section below to expand on the disadvantages of namespaces.
Anyway let's move this discussion to Talk:Namespace
- Harry Wood (talk) 06:05, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
ok, feel free to copy the whole discussion over to that page at any time. I have edited the lead, do you think it still sounds missionary? Very much prefer technical description which may include particular advantages and disadvantages over claims whether or not it is used for this or that many important features. RicoZ (talk) 13:06, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Request for Wiki Moderation Activity

See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/OpenStreetMap_is_a_social_activity&limit=500 and related pages. A large number of new links to an incomplete and controversial page. Brycenesbitt (talk) 19:51, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Oh what a surprise. You're talking about User:Xxzme.
I will add to the discussion at Talk:OpenStreetMap is a social activity
-- Harry Wood (talk) 00:52, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. Note a number of pages linking to this one come from other usernames with limited history. Brycenesbitt (talk) 01:06, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Request for internationalisation (int:Lang)

Currently we cannot coherently translate the interface using the user's language (the language defined in user's preferences, and that can be set using the Universal Language Selector (ULS) at top of pages, or can be set temporarily by adding the query parameter "?uselang=code" to the URL of the current page.

For this to work, most wikis use the following code convention to get this code: {{int:Lang}}.

However this requires loading a few very small resources in MediaWiki:Lang/code:

  • for example in MediaWiki:Lang/en you just need to define it with "en" (nothing else, just the two-letter language code).
  • It should be done for all language codes that are "supported" by MediaWiki (you can easily get this list from the PHP configuration of this wiki): this can be performed by a simple bot looping throught this code list to create these very small Mediawiki:Lang/* pages (but of course this can be donae manually, but you'll have to loop for about 400 language codes and this may be errorprone).

Such thing would take just a few minutes to complete, but for editing these MediaWiki:* special pages, this requires administration privilege.

Could you do it? It would greatly improve the internationalisation of this wiki, without necessarily having to feed many mages in the MediaWiki:* special namespace (templates will jsut use {{int:Lang}} (exactly like they can use {{int:Edit} to get the translated word "Edit" in the preferred language of the current user reading this page, or {{int:Create}} for the translated word "Create": look the effect by adding "?uselang=fr", or another language to the URL of this page, or by using the ULS at top of this page).

The alternative to these "MediaWiki:*" pages is to use the builtin parser function that can handle {{int:Lang}} directly (without having to load an external page: it recognizes the resource name "Lang" and then returns the content of the MediaWiki PHP environment variable containing this code: this is what is already done to recognize the word "edit" or "create" without needing "MediaWiki:Edit/*" or "MediaWiki:Create/*" pages, and then it uses the localized strings built into the PHP configuration files by language: ".../Language-code.php").

Thanks. — Verdy_p (talk) 12:34, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

I dont understand.
I mean I understand at a basic level. You're asking me to use my admin privileges to make and edit " in MediaWiki:Lang/en you just need to define it with "en" " ...but I don't understand the reasons (not really understanding your explanation), and I can't begin to weigh up an pros and cons that might be involved. That would take some time, which I don't have just at the moment
- Harry Wood (talk) 16:59, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
the reason is that many templates should use the user's prefered language (independantly of the current page content).
On all wikimedia wikis the "int:lang" convention is used to create these templates (e.g. on Commons to display autotranslated licences or autotranslated location names in page descriptions, or to display general maitenance banners.
This requries EITHER feeding the Media:lang/* with the codes, OR adding the small patch in the PHP code supporting the "int:" extension so that "int:lang" will return the user language (the language selected in the Universal Language selector at top of all pages, including on this wiki).
This would also solve the problem of mixed languages (e.g. "edit" is autotranslated, but not "hide", "show" which does not even use the content language of the current page (detected from its page name prefix).
It would also be useful for templates used in multilingual talk pages (most talk pages on this wiki are in fact multilingual, it's extremely rare that there are specific pages per language, and user pages never have any language code prefix so these templates can only show English to them !). — Verdy_p (talk) 18:35, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Funding drive - Bad link preview

Hi Harry, thanks for pointing us to the new funding drive. Unfortunatly the open graph preview of the link is bad (404), so if you share the link on social media, no image appears [13] (see source and look for og:) Can you please ping somebody to fix this issue? --!i! This user is member of the wiki team of OSM 19:05, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Aha interesting. Thanks. We should be able to get that fixed. There is actually card image here: http://donate.openstreetmap.org/server2015/img/twitter-card.png but the meta tags point somewhere different. I've raised an issue here: https://github.com/zerebubuth/osm-hardware-2014/issues/11 -- Harry Wood (talk) 23:25, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
Thank you! At least for Diaspora I just shared it with the uploaded pic of the wiki ;-) --!i! This user is member of the wiki team of OSM 19:30, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Moderation request - Xxzme

Xxzme - after previous block (User_talk:Xxzme#Blocked_for_3_months) is again causing problems. See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Contribute_map_data&diff=prev&oldid=1212462 ("I doubt you are the person to teach me or anyone else with your pathetic 4.5k houses per 7 years of editing".

I ask for intervention Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 13:11, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

I think a better place for putting these things is on User talk:Xxzme even if you have no intention of continuing a discussion there. Start a section with "I am recommending that you be blocked because... " and state the issue you've had.
That way A) Evidence is all in one place, and we'll see lots of issues B) There can be no accusation that Xxzme was unaware of the issues or C) There can be no accusation that Xxzme wasn't given a chance to defend himself.
We know that Xxzme will defend himself. He may even seem to win the argument sometimes (e.g. if we don't have the energy to reply) but starting so many arguments will be reason to ban him. The only way he will escape being banned again is if we start to see him actually replying in something approaching a friendly and collaborative manner.
-- Harry Wood (talk) 15:09, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

SomeoneElse toxic and uncooperative behaviour

...while ignoring arguments and efforts by multiple contributors at this wiki

I pointed in the very first reply [14] that there were change he may not aware of. But he ignores this message.

[15] first he writes his useless rant

[16] then he ignores warning to calm down

Then he continue his vague statements "wiki is broken", bring everything back without evaluating new navigational concept from Cantho or previous changes by other contributions

After he ignored navigational concept and definition of Beginners' guide multiple times(!)[17][18][19] then he lies about "me" forcing edits [20] Then he continue toxicity and personal attacks [21]

Xxzme (talk) 13:35, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Take a break. Nobody wants all these conflicts but it is you who says that someone write "rants" or adds "toxicity" - those statements you are referring to do not look deliberately malicious at all. RicoZ (talk) 14:17, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

New language template, asking for review

Could you please review the revised language template and associated support in User:Wynndale/language test?--Andrew (talk) 18:34, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Unlock

Unlock users. LenovoTest01 (talk) 11:00, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

What? -- Harry Wood (talk) 13:23, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

umap cartoview

HI Harry, regarding https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=UMap&diff=1159345&oldid=1157005 - now the tutorial is gone, right? I just see a source package and a link back to our wiki. Do you see more? --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 23:27, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

hmm I messed up the wiki history a bit there I think, but I was actually just moving that link from one section to the other. It was added by User:Adamcarto. But anyway I agree there doesn't seem to be a tutorial there any more. I have just removed the link. -- Harry Wood (talk) 18:59, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes, I saw that you just moved it, but according to your comment you have seen its contents... which are not gone. Thanks! --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 19:04, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

Hi Harry!

Hello there, I am planning to come back to OSM, (actually entering OSM in a serious way for the first time, although an accomplished contributor in other mapping and related projects for much long). As such, I am looking for a guide and mentor whom I can directly communicate with, instantly as I need. I have just found out and thought you must be an appropriate person.

For something to begin with, I have not networked enough with a god team who may already be very active and positively 'pragmatic' around my region of interest (for the time being) which is Kerala, IN and within. It will be nice if you can introduce between me and any such teams around my locality. Even external networks such as FB is good enough.

As a priority, I would like to contribute / participate in cleaning up and refining the Admin boundaries Levels 4, 5 and higher within my ROI. Is there an existing sub-project or forum this topic is being concentrated at?. Thank you. Viswaprabha (talk) 17:51, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

Welcome Viswaprabha!
Happy to help, but you're doing pretty well without me I see. You found the Kerala wiki page and listed yourself as a member there. You found the OSMIndiaMappers on facebook and commented to someone in Kerala. Looks like you're doing great!
Another good way to find active mappers in the area, is to look at the oooc map. Untick the black/red/orange minor contributors, and get in touch the top contributors (gold and purple) to say hello
Maybe you could propose an event or meet-up of some kind
-- Harry Wood (talk) 22:20, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

high-resolution tiles

Hi Harry! https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=OSM_on_Paper&diff=1275535&oldid=1275298&rcid=&curid=41504 please could you check if I made big errors. :-) I am no expert in this, just some knowledge. Made the animated gif example previously and some text on the disabilities page but though now an own page would be good to have. Cheers --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 20:47, 23 February 2016 (UTC) Thank you, happy mapping! --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 20:32, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Yeah thanks for making the High-resolution tiles page. I was thinking we could spin off a page on the topic as I was adding that info, so that's great. And I didn't know about the lyrk retina tiles. The page needed an illustration though. Just made one :-)
-- Harry Wood (talk) 23:48, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
Fine! :-) In fact I thought about including the gif image, but such an animation would be just too distracting in a text page.
I think a side-by-side comparison of hi-res and normal in 200% zoom would be good as it would show the effect which is seen most: a blurry map if you enlarge a standard map (what a user of a high-res screen will usually do). ... I am not that sure anymore that comparing different zoom levels is the best way to compare. I will have a look at it in the next few days. --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 06:45, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
Just to let you know: Sadly the geofabrik "mapnik" tiles are not available anymore (i've used them for the image), so I will not do a new image any soon, as comparing two different styles makes not much sense. --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 18:59, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

parabéns

Hi Harry, parabéns! :) --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 23:00, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

hehe. Thanks. It's pretty old news actually. Just spotted I needed to update that on my wiki user page, but we've just had our 2 year anniversary. -- Harry Wood (talk) 02:30, 2 April 2016 (UTC)
Ahhh, nice, too! --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 20:37, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

page rename

Hi Harry, didn't know who to contact to move a page but you recently moved one of the pages I edited so I thought you'd be a good person to get in touch with! :)

Could you please rename this page http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Cemetary&redirect=no to its correct spelling? Someone pointed out on talk-gb that the incorrect spelling was appearing in the search box: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2016-April/018731.html Thanks! GinaroZ (talk) 22:15, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

It's not as simple as that, because "Cemetary" is already moved (it's a redirect) and yet this page title still shows up first in the wiki search autocomplete. This is a bug in the wiki autocomplete really.
Tell you what, I'll try deleting the redirect (as temporary experiment at least). That should fix it
-- Harry Wood (talk) 22:20, 5 April 2016 (UTC)
Works. In case someone searches for the AE spelling, this this should be mentioned on the wiki page, shouldn't it? And I would suggest to at least leave a link in the deletion comment to the right page (just undelete and delete again). I've said "at least" because do we really not want AE redirects? I guess we often have them. I agree that the autocomplete should list redirects further down than real page names. --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 05:19, 6 April 2016 (UTC)
In this case cemetary is not AE, it's just incorrect ;) GinaroZ (talk) 10:52, 6 April 2016 (UTC)
Oops, sorry, I don't know how that came into my mind. Maybe the "-gb" of "talk-gb" was the culprit. ;-) --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 17:16, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Talk:OpenStreetMap License

Hi Harry, could you please have a look at Talk:OpenStreetMap License if your time permits? You were active there in the past and we should fix this. --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 19:57, 11 April 2016 (UTC) And again, please! :) --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 23:16, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

"CC license"?

HI Harry, if you are taking the effort to ask for free licensing of File:Fredy_Rivera_mapping_mountain_tracks.jpg anyway (thanks!!!), could you please ask for a real license instead of "CC license"? :-) .. the next time. "Can we CC license it?" → "Do you release it under (e.g.) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ ?" --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 20:44, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

I left it open in case they want to select CC0 / public domain. Usually I've run out of space in my tweet to explain any further. Often these situations involve people with a lesser grasp of what licenses mean and/or lesser grasp of english, so really just asking if they're happy with an "open" license is what I'm trying to get across quickly. If they respond positively but non-specifically like this, I think it's safe to assume they're happy for me to select the typical wiki license. But yeah maybe I should just ask specifically about CC BY-SA 2.0. -- Harry Wood (talk) 09:38, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for your comment! :) For this wiki it likely is enough, but the photo is not really freely licensed now (but the file page tells this to everybody ... and, why do make any effort with free licenses at all if we just want permission for the wiki/OSM anyway? ;-) ). I mean, I would not bet anything on that the author agrees to use by everybody (even commercially). The license "deed" of the CC licenses carries that message in quite short form, so providing a link to it seems to be the best way to go for me. Maybe CC has shorter links available (for twitter), but I could not find one. Have a nice, mappy weekend! --Aseerel4c26 (talk) 19:52, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
Most CC licences are valid on this wiki (they are not in OSM data, except CC0 and CC-BY, but CC-BY-SA is now forbidden). Yo are not required to use CC0 or public domain. The wiki itself is CC-BY-SA by default (for the wikitext). And images/files have their own licences that should be indicated in their description page, and it is (CC-BY-SA 2.0). Only the CC licences with the NC restriction (non-commercial) are not accepted on this wiki (even with the "fair use" exception which is only valid in US and accepted in English Wikipedia hosted in US, but not in other Wikipedias and in GB where the wiki is hosted). What is the problem then ? — Verdy_p (talk) 19:55, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Userboxes

Hi Harry, thanks for editing userboxesǃ I have built some templates like User hails from europe and wanted to ask you about your opinion about it. My intention is to create more for each country worldwide, but i wonder what would be the best way to organise it?ǃ

  • make a section for each single continent with the separated countries in it (like for europe now)?
  • make one big categorie only with all countries (one big box for all)?
  • for cities make a country specific boxes (like "user hails from France|Paris")
  • what about yet existing userboxes that could be merged into this "universal" boxes? could you help me to move them later?

It would be nice to have only few consistent userboxes with the same design for each continent, state, (big) cities.. at the moment it´s a little chaotic. Could you please help me to get it organised? The boxes i will create time after time. Greets --Ziltoidium (talk) 05:15, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Unexplained removal from amenity=atm

There was a discussion with explanations here.

TL;DR wiki user adds content to amenity=bank a long ago regarding tagging machines of the same bank separately under a false "detailed mapping" justification and I provide a point about why this is a bad idea and should be avoided. I removed the info from the amenity=atm to keep consistency across related wiki pages.

Cheers. ----Absay (talk) 17:14, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Wiki categories seem to be broken

Hi! I'm not sure what's going on, but categorizing pages and files on this wiki does not seem to be working at all. The category where there files or pages are placed do not show those files or pages. I am guessing that an update to MediaWiki broke things and there is a need to set up the job queue. See the following links for more information:

—seav (talk) 10:45, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

I have the same remark: any categorized (or recategorized) page do not appear where they should (even when the job queue is empty and after waiting for a couple of days).
Some worker job must not be working as expected and could be failing (look at the Mediawiki logs to see what's happening, probably there's a missing index that causes these jobs to be canceled by some timeout, because I've observed over time that these updates, when they were working, were getting longer and loger to appear). I suspect this failure (a missing index) because the job queue has been emptied several times, without any effect on members not listed in categories. — Verdy_p (talk) 19:37, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
Do you have the capability to schedule the "refreshLinks.php" on this wiki to refresh the many broken links, uncategorized contents, missing "what links here", double redirects, and so on since MediaWiki 1.28? Or do you know which techn-admin to contact to perform maintenance on the content, or look at error logs on the wiki server (and check disk usages, or some Mediawiki's PHP settings needed since version 1.28, including changing tuning parameters for the Job queue, possibly asking for necessary assistance/suggestions to Wikimedia MediaWiki ? Problems are accumulating on thi swiki, and basic maintenance for the coherence of data (or simply to track content usages) is now extremely difficult.
Deferred tasks and backound jobs have not at all since end of May, or failed continusously and then been abandonned after 3 attempts to run them, when background jobs are supposed to run every 1-5 minute
May be the "cron" task (in the Linux system scheduler) to run them is simply disabled and has not been reenabled, or there's an incorrect path/environment set to run them with the configured user account and its default shell profile, or that user account is disabled/renamed in Linux...) — Verdy_p (talk) 21:19, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
I do not have server admin access. I left a note with the operations team here: https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/165 but they're pretty busy. The wiki isn't super high on their priorities. The config is all managed by chef here: https://github.com/openstreetmap/chef/tree/master/cookbooks/wiki Some mention of a cron job here, but that's just the disabled wiki dump script. -- Harry Wood (talk) 21:58, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
Other stuff is not working in the wiki internal. I have added it to the github issue tracker.--Zuse (talk) 07:22, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Bot account

Would it please be possible to add User:Stereo_repair to the bots? Thanks!

-- Stereo (talk) 14:51, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

OK. Done. I've put that user in the 'bot' group. -- Harry Wood (talk) 16:37, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Could you also add User:TigerfellBot? I also posted that at Firefishy's talk page, but got no response yet. --Tigerfell This user is member of the wiki team of OSM (Let's talk) 10:41, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

Blocking a user from reverting me

Hello. Any chance it would be possible to ban a particular user from reverting me? The person has been particularly arbitrary in what he has reverted, leaves nonsensical revert comments, and seems unwilling to discuss things in a civil, productive manor. Plus, he blocked me from posting on his talk page and says he won't respond to any messages I send him anywhere. Which is extremely one sided and makes it impossible to resolve any dispute about pages. In general, I don't mind if other people who are willing to discuss things revert me, but I just don't want to deal with him anymore whenever I edit a page or otherwise. If so, the users name is Verdy_p. Thank you.

-- User:Adamant1 06:13, 27 May 2018

Persian Localization of Main sidebar

Hi, please update the links/names of Persian wiki, thanks: 

English name
Persian name
Link to Persian version
--------------------------
Main page
صفحهٔ اصلی
Fa:Main_Page
---------
The map
نقشه
---------
Map Features
عوارض نقشه
Fa:Map_Features
---------
Contributors
مشارکت‌کنندگان
---------
Help
راهنما
Help:Contents/fa
---------
Blogs
وبلاگ‌ها
---------
Shop
فروشگاه
---------
Donations
حمایت

-- User:Iriman 08:29, 11 July 2018‎

Thanks for supplying those translations. That's great! Great to be getting everything translated into Persian!
So that's done. If you want to create Persian translations of OSM Blogs, Merchandise or Donations, then I have a bit more work to do linking those URLs in.
Some details for my own records:
We can see the results at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page?uselang=fa
I needed to edit all of these (wiki admin only):
These are translations of the link text appearing in the sidebar:
These are URLs we use for those links when set to the 'fa' language:
-- Harry Wood (talk) 12:54, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

Great! I would inform you in case of translating them. Thanks for it. -- iriman (talk) 15:09, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

Simple image MediaWiki Extension broken?

Hi,

It looks to me as if the extension can not fetch the images anymore. I have checked different pages and my browser, but I can simply not reach [staticmap.openstreetmap.de]. I waited a few days, but it is still not running. Do you know anything? I have contacted the "webmaster" in case of a different subdomain which is also not available anymore on Wednesday, 19. September, but not received an answer yet. You might know better ways of communicating... Would be nice if you could fix this. --Tigerfell This user is member of the wiki team of OSM (Let's talk) 09:59, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

hmmm yes StaticMapsLite seems to be offline. I've tried to report this here: https://github.com/dfacts/staticmaplite/issues/16 -- Harry Wood (talk) 22:31, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

Looking at the answer and the ideas for improvements, would https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Kartographer be an appropriate replacement? --Tigerfell This user is member of the wiki team of OSM (Let's talk) 19:37, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

It now says "This repository has been archived by the owner. It is now read-only." and the conversations are not visible any more. What does that mean? --Tigerfell This user is member of the wiki team of OSM (Let's talk) 09:14, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

Looks like somebody switched off the 'issues' tab on that github repo. I don't know who dfacts is. It seems like openstreetmap.de/FOSSGIS people took over running this thing just recently, which is what I was hoping they would do, but it also seems like they are not much better than dfacts at communicating in a helpful way. Someone's decided it's bests to obliterate all questions and the few answers we had on there so far, I guess because they have very little patience for people asking questions. -- Harry Wood (talk) 12:52, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

I can still just see the referrer text and the HTTPS issue is not solved yet either. Does the extension need a change to include the referrers or is that just my computer making it wrong? I opened a new issue in the openstreetmap.de/FOSSGIS repo fossgis/openstreetmap.de/issues/25 GitHub regarding the HTTPS connection. I hope someone replies. --Tigerfell This user is member of the wiki team of OSM (Let's talk) 17:42, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

After this not fully satisfying reply from giggls GitHub I suggested the installation of a new map extension at Wiki:talk. I would be happy to hear your opinion. --Tigerfell This user is member of the wiki team of OSM (Let's talk) 19:57, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

Well ... I guess they do not care and cannot fix our issue. Would it be worth finding a new provider for the map images? --Tigerfell This user is member of the wiki team of OSM (Let's talk) 12:14, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

New hope for static maps?

System-users-3.svgkambrium (on osm) recently wrote a forum post about a new static map service. Is this an alternative for the current situation? I am personally not really interested in static maps on the wiki, so my fix would be a replacement with enhanced slippy maps... --Tigerfell This user is member of the wiki team of OSM (Let's talk) 17:39, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

That doesn't really help because it's not a static map service, it's just another option for software which lets you run a static map service (yet another. We already have quite a few. And yet another unimaginative name!). I will add it to the list on the static map images page though.
But anyway good news:
I fixed the SimpleMap extension
I found out about the Wikimedia maps static image service. It's not well documented, which might mean they don't really want people using it, so I'm not actually sure how reliable that one will be either in the long run. Also it's a bit weird to have a different style on these maps. But... that's a lot better than not working!
I'm still pondering other solutions. I think I might host a static map image service on harrywood.co.uk! Then when the hosts turn out to be a incompetent, I'll have nobody but myself to blame! :-)
-- Harry Wood (talk) 23:30, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

That sounds great. The different style was actually the striking argument against Wikimedia's Kartographer extension as a replacement for Slippy Map Extension... I guess I will still continue with the changing the MultiMaps extension for our wiki. --Tigerfell This user is member of the wiki team of OSM (Let's talk) 21:08, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Wikimedia has blocked access to their tile service and static maps is broken again (Firefishy/SimpleMap/issues/4 GitHub). I was wondering if it is possible to run a static map service from your dev account webspace and limit access to this wiki in the case that high load becomes an issue? --Tigerfell This user is member of the wiki team of OSM (Let's talk) 09:14, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
One year later, it is still broken. :-( I do not see any progress with FOSSGIS. There seems to be one alternative to replacing Simple image extension only. That is running it from an OSMF server and limiting access to the wiki. There probably was a tile stitching service at https://ojw.dev.openstreetmap.org/StaticMap/. Do you think we could use that or start a new instance on a Dev server? Otherwise, I would propose an automated replacement of the extension from the wiki. --Tigerfell This user is member of the wiki team of OSM (Let's talk) 12:10, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

Deletion policy

Dear Harry Wood,

We would like to invite you to voting in the case of the proposed Deletion policy for wiki pages and files. Based on the input of several contributors, we drafted a deletion policy over the span of two and a half months. Among other things, the policy proposes a centralised discussion page for all cases which are not mentioned explicitly.

Kind regards, EzekielT

PS: I wrote this message on your talk page, because you were involved in a long dispute about deleting in 2018 and 2019 which now led to this policy draft. — EzekielT (talk) 18:06, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Bot flag for user TigerfellBot?

System-users-3.svgMalgiK (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.) recently asked me why TigerfellBot shows up in recent changes despite hiding bot changes. According to Bot documentation in MediaWiki, the user account needs the bot right to flag the edits as bot edits and this is included in the bot user group. Do you think it is reasonable to flag the account as a bot? --Tigerfell This user is member of the wiki team of OSM (Let's talk) 12:10, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes. I think it makes sense flag the account as a bot.
Want me to do it?
-- Harry Wood (talk) 17:10, 25 January 2020 (UTC)
Yes, please. --Tigerfell This user is member of the wiki team of OSM (Let's talk) 17:40, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Remove first version of image

Hi! I need your help to wipe the first version of this file (has personal info-ish). Many thanks in advance! AkuAnakTimur (talk) 15:01, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Farm picture

Hello Harry, I was wondering if you could edit your picture https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Landuse%3Dfarmyard.jpg According to https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:landuse%3Dfarmland the meadows around the farm should be tagged as landuse=meadow. I could edit your image but I think the quality would be better if you did it on the original image. Best regards! --Qualyptus (talk) 21:10, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Sorry. I was ignoring this because... I'm a bit tired of it [22]... but I see someone else acted upon this idea and modified the image to show landuse=meadow. As I was just saying over at File talk:Landuse=farmland.jpg (better place to discuss this) the change probably shouldn't have happened as a new version of a file with the name "File:Landuse=farmland.jpg" so I'm doing some work to fix that, naming the new image more logically as "File:Landuse=farmyard and landuse=meadow.jpg". -- Harry Wood (talk) 19:14, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Hi Harry, regarding the farmland image mentioned above I would like to (begin to) clarify a hierarchy for the landuse=farmland tag and its subset tag crop=* . There appears to be inconsistency with it regarding landuse=meadow and landuse=grassland and I would like to propose your image to say landuse=farmland, crop=grass for the grass fields in your image, that way there is an order/hierarchy to the tagging of fields with a parent (farmland) / child (crop) system. This would require deprecation / clarification of the meadow tag at some point in the (distant) future, either bringing it under the crop=* tag or losing it. What are your thoughts please? Best regards, --DerB (talk) 12:14, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

I would suggest asking people in general on tagging mailing list or talk page of landuse=farmland or some other contact channel rather than by asking specific people that are quite likely to be busy or not interested in this specific topic Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 19:22, 28 November 2021 (UTC)
Yeah I don't know if "crop=grass" is a good idea, but I can certainly tell you it's just the latest in a long line of ideas for mapping farms which frankly I was already pretty tired of back 10 years ago when I wrote this rant about it!
The image I created was an effort to clarify the situation back then. I wish I could say it worked!
If you're making a new version of the image showing different tags, please upload it with a new filename reflecting the tags it shows.
-- Harry Wood (talk) 19:14, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Requesting bot status for bot account

I am requesting bot status for https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:MissingImageInfoBot - that would reduce how often it is blocked by rate limit restrictions Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 19:22, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

We don't have many wiki bots. Certainly not many created recently. So hopefully it's not inappropriate for me to grant that access. The main issue I can see is if your edited rate causes a problem for the wiki server.
Anyway I've gone ahead and granted it in the hope that you know what you're doing :-)
-- Harry Wood (talk) 02:01, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
I have some delays (primarily to make easier to catch bugs before too many pages are damaged for easier cleanup - though so far it never happened with bot edits of OSM data). I am not expecting that this edit rate would cause problems for server itself. And for potential new edits - I will ask on Talk:Wiki before running more, test on smaller scale, link example edits and give some time to review while testing on small scale. So hopefully things will go fine Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 10:09, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Images

For start, thanks for uploading very useful images! But I am going though Category:Media_without_a_license and spotted some there.

Are you author of images https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Farm_landuse_(with_livestock).jpgOOjs UI icon check-constructive.svg https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:4th_anniversary_-_JBurgess_and_Steve8.jpgOOjs UI icon check-constructive.svg  ?

Or is it copied from some other place (which one?)?

Would you agree to open licensing of this image, allowing its use by anyone (similarly to your OSM edits)?

Would you be OK with https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Template:CC0 (it allows use without attribution or any other requirement) ?

Or do you prefer to require attribution and some other things using https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Template:CC-BY-SA-4.0 ?

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Pub.jpgOOjs UI icon check-constructive.svg mentions source - but is without license, so it would be nice to change this

Probably also some other from https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListFiles&limit=500&user=Harry+Wood&ilsearch= are affected

Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 13:32, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

Hello, one in addition - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Florist.jpgOOjs UI icon check-constructive.svg - solving would be great! Regards, --Chris2map (talk) 12:05, 31 October 2021 (UTC

This might be suitable, I can upload to the wiki if required. SK53 (talk) 16:02, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

Missing file information

Sorry for bothering you about this, but it is important to know source of the uploaded files.

Are you the author of image File:Food and wine shop.jpgOOjs UI icon check-constructive.svg ?

Would you agree to open licensing of this image, allowing its use by anyone (similarly to your OSM edits)?

--Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 06:40, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Yep. Done (CC0) -- Harry Wood (talk) 14:17, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Missing file information

... image File:The Mad Hatter Pub-London.jpgOOjs UI icon check-constructive.svg ... --Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 13:35, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Done {{CC0-self}} -- Harry Wood (talk) 01:51, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

Missing file information

... File:Polo shirt.jpgOOjs UI icon check-constructive.svg ?

--Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 21:04, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

Yep CC0 done. -- Harry Wood (talk) 08:21, 13 June 2022 (UTC)
In general relevant files which seems to be missing clear licenses are listed at User:Mateusz Konieczny/notify uploaders/Harry Wood (sorry for bothering you but sadly at least some uploaded images were not authored by mappers and ideally it would be clarified, to make potential reuse easier and to avoid confusion in future) Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 20:32, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
Ah thanks. I was going to ask you if I there's a list of files you're going to notify me about :-)
So hopefully now I've done them all (all cc0-self).
-- Harry Wood (talk) 20:49, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

File:Solicitors2.jpg - found another one, regards, Chris2map (talk) 10:06, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

Done! (cc0) -- Harry Wood (talk) 21:24, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

Missing file information

Are you the creator of image File:London Angel 2009-03-03 1.JPG ?

--Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 20:04, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

I had to email the creator of this one (Shaun) to check. Done! (cc0) -- Harry Wood (talk) 08:36, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Account rename

Resolved: it's already resolved, another user did this for me.

Hi, I wish to rename my account to the following: Elefant aus Wuppertal like in my osm profile. Could you do that? Thank you very much. --Lukas458 (talk) 16:03, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

Account Rename

Hi! I'd like to rename my wiki account to "spughetti" like my osm.org profile. Thanks in advance. :) -- User:Publicerination 14:57, 16 November 2023‎

ok. The user "Publicerination" has been renamed to "Spughetti" (User:Spughetti). Mediawiki requires capitalised names. -- Harry Wood (talk) 16:27, 17 November 2023 (UTC)
Resolved

Account rename

Hi Harry, I would like to kindly ask if you could change my wiki user name? I'd like my OSM wiki name to match my final OSM user name (it underwent some changes over time). My desired wiki username would be EuroPathfinder.

Thanks a lot in advance! -- User:Orb_pathfinder 09:35, 22 April 2024

Sorry. I see that's been done now by User:Lynx -- Harry Wood (talk) 09:47, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
Resolved

Account rename

Hi, I would like to rename my username to "Samaila"

Thanks in advance! -- User:Soltha 13:05 (UTC), 10 June 2024

Resolved
-- Harry Wood (talk) 13:01, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

Account rename

Hello! I have changed my username on OSM to "griffonboi" and would like that reflected here on the wiki as well. Thank you! Mikideez (talk) 04:54, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

That's done. MediaWiki names are always capitalised so it's User:Griffonboi
Resolved
-- Harry Wood (talk) 13:03, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

NMW03 -> Nemoralis

Hello. I am NMW03 on OSM, and Nemoralis on Wikimedia projects. Can you rename me to Nemoralis here? User:Nemoralis never edited with their account, zero activity. Nemoralis (talk) 04:06, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

So your wiki username is already as desired?
I can't help you with your main OSM account. The good news is you can help yourself! You can just change your username on there. Go to https://www.openstreetmap.org/account/edit and change your "Display Name" (I don't know why. I always thought it was a bit too permissive, but there it is!). The bad news is, it won't let you change it to a name which is already taken. So you can easily select a similar username e.g. Nemoralis2 or TheRealNemoralis.
If you want the "Nemoralis" name you should first try messaging them and asking very nicely if they wouldn't mind renaming themselves (Give them the same link https://www.openstreetmap.org/account/edit ) ...but you may well not get a reply. Failing that, I'm not sure. I don't know if this is a request the Operations Working Group would help with. It would have to be them doing it, but they're a bit too busy to be dealing with this sort of thing, so you may be out of luck.
-- Harry Wood (talk) 13:09, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

Account Rename

Hello, I would like to change my wiki username to "MG-LSJ" to reflect my OSM account username. Thanks

-- User:Lakshyajeet Jalal - 13:43, 7 July 2024

OK I've just done that for you
Resolved
--Harry Wood (talk) 08:25, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Account rename

Hello! I have changed my username on openstreetmap and Wikimedia projects to "Una tantum", I would like the same account here. Thank you in advance! Patafisik 07:52, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

OK I've just done that for you
Resolved
--Harry Wood (talk) 08:25, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Account rename

Hello, I would like my account username to be renamed as CartoNex as this is also my OSM username. Thank you. Elme12 (talk) 19:40, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

OK I've just done that for you
Resolved
--Harry Wood (talk) 01:42, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Account rename

Hi, I renamed my OSM account as Danÿa and I would like my wiki account renamed as well. Thanks! Darmo (talk) 21:01, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

OK I've just done that for you
Resolved
-- Harry Wood (talk) 23:56, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
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