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Comment by anc84 | Hacker News Reader

Don't use OpenStreetMap they said, anyone can edit that and vandalised it they said, it will be full of errors and inaccuracies they said.

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Also, never use Wikipedia for anything. Since everybody can change it, it's useless.

Ironically, many pages of Wikipedia are useless because they're so difficult to permanently change...

Wikipedia + the talk pages is closer to an ideal encyclopedia.

One of the major criticism of Wikipedia is that it preempts the possibility of having multiple encyclopedias, and thus multiple points of view. But, once you consider the talk pages, you not only restore the multiple points of view, but you also get to witness the contests between them. In that way, at least, this is better than having multiple encyclopedias.

My ideal encyclopedia does not have hundreds of thousands of words of discussion about the important differences between en dash, em dash, minus and hyphen.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8600342

Here's fifteen thousand words of discussion about en and em dashes and hyphens and minus signs. And at the end of that one discussion? No consensus. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(poli...

And this is about punctuation. Imagine what it's like on actually contentious issues - Balkans wars, various islands claimed by more than one territory. Etc.

I happen to be a typophile; so, those discussions are interesting to me.

On the other hand, those are probably just examples of bike shedding[1]. The various talk pages on the Balkan Wars articles range from about 9,000 to 15,000 words, for instance.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality

Of course, another aspect of encyclopedias is that they organize a body of information; while the main page may force a structure of some kind, talk pages tend to go all over the place. But agreed that they add much needed facts and POVs beyond the one wikipedia "way" on the main page.

Agreed, but that implies that people haven't given up on trying to get facts or information into pages that are managed nefariously. To me it feels like the talk sections have been dying off. So many things at wikipedia have become advertorials.

Wikipedia is actually pretty bad, try following up on any of the references. If they're web references, the chances of it being a 404 page are almost 100% in my experience. Not to mention the editors being almost all white men and the opaque process that limits most "non-male" topics: http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/wikipedia-college-classes-...

Wikipedia is basically infotainment, the Buzzfeed of encyclopedias. See also: Wikigroaning: http://www.somethingawful.com/news/wikigroaning/

> For example, the article called "Knight." Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we'll go with "Jedi Knight." Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created."

Wikipedia is no substitute for a real subject encyclopedia.

> Wikipedia is basically infotainment, the Buzzfeed of encyclopedias. See also: Wikigroaning: http://www.somethingawful.com/news/wikigroaning/

Wikipedia may have problems, but I'm not sure how this particular issue is a mark against it. Wikipedia's editorial resources aren't limited in the same way as a traditional publication. It's not like curtailing "frivolous" subjects will result in better quality "serious" articles: the people who write Star Wars articles are not going to take up medieval history if you prevent them from editing their favorite subjects.

Do you think they deserve equal intellectual footing?

My primary annoyance when reading Wikipedia is when authors will generalize the opinion of two or three cited sources into something like "...many scholars believe X." At that point they're lending more credence to a statement than is actually attributable. In reality, it's more like "three people in the world think that X." It's probably not always done intentionally, but it's really quite sneaky how isolated opinions or viewpoints can gain acceptance as facts simply by how they're presented.

Ever wondered about all the things that this group of "many scholars" have concluded? Check out this Google Search:

http://goo.gl/OKkBWA

And that is why such lines gets tagged with [who?] or the ever popular [citation needed]. You can even tag them yourself.

Learn to use way back machine...

>Wikipedia is no substitute for a real subject encyclopedia.

Who says it is? It's for quick pointers.

A subject encyclopedia will have much better pointers, definitely real citations, often annotated citations.

What "serious" purpose does Wikipedia serve, other than being a timely source for things that haven't made it into a subject encyclopedia yet?

The serious purpose of having a little (a lot) of everything in one place. For free. For everyone. In any language.

A kid in India can hop from physiology, to psychology, to medicine, to anthropology, to geography, to history, to economics, to... Do you get the point?

I guess we shoould just plug wikipedia off and stick a giant banner that says "Wikipedia is not sufficient for scientific inquiry, so we closed it. Go buy Thomson Web of Science."

I'm sure Maadhav in India will be very happy and rest assured that no incomplete information is on the Internet.

We're talking about two different audiences. To kids or adult novices to a topic, it's fine as a brief introduction in exactly the same way a Cracked.com or Mental Floss article. It's infotainment, which doesn't imply that the information is wrong, just shallow and not necessarily written by someone well-versed and informed about the topic.

Well, I certainly wouldn't use it without crosschecking facts ;)

Information that's either true or completely made up is usually true. So if they say "the population of X is Y", or something like that, I'll trust them.

Do you cross-check everything else?

I'm sure it depends in what capacity the information is "used", right?

Something I never understood. When referencing a "real" encyclopedia you have to include the revision number thus if information changes in later revisions your citation remains intact. Wikipedia is exactly the same. When you cite Wikipedia you should include the revision number so that if it changes (as it frequently does) you haven't lost the text referenced. Could higher change frequency provide higher mis-information? Sure but a "real" encyclopedia has the same problem (maybe at a smaller scale) So in either case you have to either pay someone to fact check (like most encyclopedia companies do and could easily be done for Wikipedia) and/or do the fact check yourself. The later being the core at Wikipedia culture^[citation needed].

Any real encyclopedias where hoaxes would not get corrected for years?

See http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/04/... - it's been featured on the main page just a few days ago.

The same article points out that the editors-to-articles ratio has been rapidly falling from 2007 to 2014 (it bounced back a little this year, but it's too early to say if it isn't just a fluke).

Well if you end up with a vandalized wikipedia page maybe you end up misinformed. If you end up with wrong map data, maybe you end up lost or dead.

Something similar happened when a Google Street View image of a chap being 'seen to' by a prostitute soared in popularity a few years ago in my home town. The name of the street was, for a few hours, known as 'handjob ally'.

Handjob Ally has nothing on some of the mediaeval English streets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gropecunt_Lane

Oh well, since we're on the subject http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butt_Hole_Road

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mort_aux_Juifs They had some weird tastes in city names back then

Careful, you might end up in a https://www.google.com/maps/@35.8947544,-78.5993332,20z

http://tinyurl.com/63byd

Its a real town in Austria. I'm just pretty sure I'd be flagged as offensive if I posted the Wikipedia link directly :-)

But the above link is to Wikipedia.

Short links are way more offensive than words. Here's the direct link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking,_Austria

Apparently it is good for the tourism industry, people even used to steal the Fucking signs.

A friend of mine lives in a village called Fingeringhoe...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingringhoe

For a while, a local park here was labeled "Dog Poop Park".

http://i.imgur.com/3AMb6X5.png

Was this the one in Manchester city centre by any chance?

Indeed it was :)

I checked the history of the place on OSM and I found nothing. http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/33.514583/73.059222

I was being sarcastic about the view of many that Google and other commercial maps must be better just because they are commercial. OSM is not without its own share of vandalism, but it is rare and usually hidden somewhere.

Google maps has tons of user generated content through Mapmaker. http://www.google.com/mapmaker

Yeah, it makes me sad how people actually enjoy feeding a proprietary data silo instead of providing their knowledge to everyone for free in open projects.

shrug they are making the best map better. I can see why you disagree, but it's pretty understandable.

Best is in the eye of beholder. As for amount of detail, accuracy, speed of updates and speed of response to such vandalism, OSM seems much better to me (at least judging by its European coverage, don't know how good it's in your location). No Street View? That's acceptable for me.

Well, OSM is very variable depending on country.

In Britain and France, OSM is very good. In NL and DE, it is amazing. In the US, it is okay.

It sort of depends on the user community that edits it. OSM is used heavily by the cycling community who want to put all the off-road cycle paths and so on onto the map. And it's used by hikers and wheelchair users and a bunch of other subcommunities who want to make it good for them.

In the US, there isn't such a big community of fanatical cyclists and so on, so less need for alternatives to commercial maps like Google and Apple.

As for Street View - give it a few years. Mapillary is building a Creative Commons-licensed, user generated Street View. http://mapillary.com - example: http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/SX2UBibwT4S1h4u_jSHmxg

your parent was pointing out that google maps is just as susceptible to vandalism, not that OSM was an issue in this case

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