Wiki
The OpenStreetMap Wiki (this website) is a place for help documentation, technical documentation and promotional material on everything related to the OpenStreetMap project. It is not the OpenStreetMap project itself, but rather a documentation store designed to provide guidance for map contributors and users. Spend time to explore this site and discover new things about OpenStreetMap! The Main Page is a good starting point; so is the OSM category tree.
Content status and correctness
The Wiki aims to describe various common practices and community conventions, in particular the various mapping tags and the meanings of different values. Typically, the contents of the OSM Wiki are correct, but this is not guaranteed. In case of doubt, it is worth investigating the situation, e.g. reading the talk pages and linked discussions if you disagree with something recommended here. And of course, as it is a wiki, improving its content is always welcome!
The Wiki is a living resource and should not be treated as a final, fixed source of information. When there are formal proposals and decisions, these tend to be documented in the wiki, and are indeed authoritative (see for example Organised Editing Guidelines). Other than that, the documentation present here is informative rather than prescriptive and authoritative (see Any tags you like for more background on this philosophy). Generally, tagging practices that went through the proposal process and were discussed, reviewed and approved are highly encouraged to be followed, but exceptions are always possible, following common sense and measured judgment.
Finally, please note that the Wiki can have mistakes, missing information, outdated pages, outdated (or entirely missing) translations, and even pages written by people who documented their preferences rather than common tagging practices. If you spot such missing, incomplete, obsolete, or incorrect content, by all means feel free to go ahead and edit it, or start a discussion in the corresponding talk pages if you're in doubt. Any help improving the content of the wiki is highly welcome!
Help
If you have ideas for the wiki, you can generally just do them, by editing the wiki! If you need any assistance ask on Talk:Wiki. Other editors can provide help with general guidance, tables, templates, categories, and so on...
Larger restructuring projects should also be discussed at Talk:Wiki. See also ongoing maintenance, in relation to Wiki maintenance tasks.
Tools
The wiki uses normal tools of the MediaWiki system, of course. The main ones are:
Technical Wiki Details
The wiki is powered by MediaWiki (http://mediawiki.org). See the "Special:Version" page for an up-to-date view of which version we are running, and what extensions are installed. For details of the server it is running on see https://hardware.openstreetmap.org/servers/konqi.openstreetmap.org/ (maintained by System administrators).
If you have ideas for technical improvements to the way the wiki works (e.g. extensions we should install), please take these to the discussion page here, and/or raise tickets in Talk:WikiProject Cleanup. As always, please do a few searches to see if anyone has already suggested the same thing (including a mailing list google to allow you to link related discussions).
Ongoing
- Single sign on between wiki and the OSM front end, is an obvious suggestion which has been made and discussed repeatedly.
- Migrating part of the Wiki Translation to the Translate extension has also been discussed: see Proposed features/Add Translate extension to Wiki which was accepted. Implementation awaits solving some technical issues. (TODO: link relevant github issues)
- Requires upgrading Mediawiki to 1.38 from current version ( https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/760 )
- This requires new extension for map display ( https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/749 )
- Requires upgrading Mediawiki to 1.38 from current version ( https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/760 )
Wiki Dumps / Export
Daily full history exports of this wiki are available here:
- https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/dump/ (5.5 GB as of 11 February 2024[update])
This is configured to run dumpBackup.php with --full (All revisions) each morning.
If you want a much older snapshot for some reason:
- dump file from March 2013 (75 Mb)