How to connect discussions in the OSM Wiki to this forum?

markkerrigan · 2022-08-18T03:18:05.051Z

I seem to recall that it was suggested that various proposals that used to be voted on through the wiki might be transitioned to community.openstreetmap.org in the future. But since the adoption of the forum is a slow process this is understandable.

The challenge is I would like to solicit feedback for improving Tag:amenity=parking - OpenStreetMap Wiki . But it seems unclear whether it’s better to post on the talk page or to just post here in this forum and make my edits without posting anything on the talk page, as it seems the OSM Wiki and discussion forums are rather siloed from each other.

Will this be a more long-term goal to encourage discussion regarding the wiki into the discussion forums?

Sam_Wilson · 2022-08-18T06:47:54.193Z

Could there be a way of tagging topics here as relating to specific wiki pages? e.g. something like #wiki:tag:amenity=parking where the part after #wiki: is the wiki page name? Then, all related topics could be listed on the wiki page (in reverse chronological order, perhaps with dates next to them).

There’s a MediaWiki extension that I’ve been poking at a bit that might be useful: Extension:Discourse - MediaWiki — it’d make it possible for Lua modules on-wiki to pull in data from Discourse.

Mateusz_Konieczny · 2022-08-18T06:55:51.541Z

markkerrigan:

I seem to recall that it was suggested that various proposals that used to be voted on through the wiki might be transitioned to community.openstreetmap.org in the future

I am not aware of such plans. And for voting this forum is even worse than Wiki anyway due to dynamic loading/hiding posts (even ctrl+f is broken as result)

Mateusz_Konieczny · 2022-08-18T06:56:22.675Z

markkerrigan:

But it seems unclear whether it’s better to post on the talk page or to just post here

You can also do both.

nukeador · 2022-08-18T09:49:12.896Z

Mateusz_Konieczny:

voting this forum is even worse than Wiki

I’m curious about this, what’s not working on discourse voting as you expected?

SomeoneElse · 2022-08-18T10:22:50.364Z

nukeador:

what’s not working on discourse voting as you expected

Voting here hasn’t been implemented in any meaningful sense at all yet. See e.g. here and here. That’s fine, as long as we’re still on the “migrating the forums” part of the project and haven’t yet started on “migrating the help site” - but it’s worrying that you think that the site is actually working.

nukeador · 2022-08-18T10:38:08.303Z

SomeoneElse:

Voting here hasn’t been implemented in any meaningful sense at all yet. See e.g. here and here.

I suspect @Mateusz_Konieczny is referring to “poll voting” rather than upvoting messages, or at least that’s what I understood and I’m curious to know more about his opinion.

Tordanik · 2022-08-18T19:54:53.752Z

At the moment, your best bet for visibility is probably to mention the discussion on both the wiki talk page and this forum. (You can link from one to the other to avoid parallel discussions.)

As a long-term perspective, I do feel that this site could usefully replace wiki talk pages for at least some of the discussions that currently take place there. Idiosyncracies such as the need to manually place signatures, indent your post, and so on, limit the wiki’s usability for discussions. I also find it annoying that it’s not possible to watch any discussion/thread separately from other discussions on the same page. This is particularly problematic for the relatively high-activity Talk:Wiki page, which would probably be the one that could be most easily and productively replaced with discussions on this forum because it relates to the wiki as a whole, not a particular page.

For talk pages of key/tag sites, we would likely want some solution for listing all discussions related to a particular page before we could consider moving them here. Maybe the Lua plugin mentioned by @Sam_Wilson can do that?

Mateusz_Konieczny:

I am not aware of such plans. And for voting this forum is even worse than Wiki anyway due to dynamic loading/hiding posts (even ctrl+f is broken as result)

If this site was used for proposal votes, we would likely use polls. So I suspect there’s a misunderstanding somewhere because I don’t see how these would be affected by broken Ctrl+f behavior. Personally, it seems plausible to me that a poll would improve usability compared to the current system of editing a wiki page to add your name.

Sam_Wilson · 2022-08-19T00:19:45.308Z

Tordanik:

For talk pages of key/tag sites, we would likely want some solution for listing all discussions related to a particular page before we could consider moving them here. Maybe the Lua plugin mentioned by @Sam_Wilson can do that?

Yep, it definitely could make a dynamically-updated list of links to topics. I think the problem is that we’d need a way of associating topics here with pages there. I mentioned using Discourse tags, which probably would work? I’m not quite sure! Certainly, if it did, we could add a ‘start new discussion’ link to the wiki topic list, as a way of auto-filling the tag here — actually, we could do that right now with a template containing something like:

https://community.openstreetmap.org/new-topic?tags={{FULLPAGENAMEE}}

Of course, the listing stuff predicated on the Discourse MediaWiki extension being approved for deployment here. I’m working on a similar process for Wikimedia (note that that’s about preparing the extension for deployment; actually deploying anywhere needs full community and sysadmin consensus!).

Minh_Nguyen · 2022-08-19T06:13:12.642Z

This site does have the advantage of federating with OSM.org user accounts. Creating and managing a separate wiki account is an impediment to users who already have to juggle multiple chat server logins, especially since voting is the only reason the user would be required to set up an account. But recent explorations of enabling OAuth on the wiki are encouraging.

Tordanik:

Idiosyncracies such as the need to manually place signatures, indent your post, and so on, limit the wiki’s usability for discussions. I also find it annoying that it’s not possible to watch any discussion/thread separately from other discussions on the same page. This is particularly problematic for the relatively high-activity Talk:Wiki page, which would probably be the one that could be most easily and productively replaced with discussions on this forum because it relates to the wiki as a whole, not a particular page.

The Wikimedia Foundation is working on a series of improvements that (finally) address these and other pain points for discussing things on the wiki. So far, most of their work has been deployed across the Wikimedia wikis and is available in the form of the DiscussionTools extension, currently in beta. Hopefully we can take it up once it’s more mature. It’s already plenty safer than Flow and much easier to use than the Convenient Discussions gadget, but individual features are still in flux.

Sam_Wilson:

There’s a MediaWiki extension that I’ve been poking at a bit that might be useful: Extension:Discourse - MediaWiki — it’d make it possible for Lua modules on-wiki to pull in data from Discourse.

If this extension supports all the read methods in the Discourse API, as the readme implies, that’s pretty powerful.

The sysadmins are understandably hesitant to install exotic new extensions, especially ones that aren’t marked as stable. But seeing a mapper’s name on it is a promising sign.

Mateusz_Konieczny · 2022-08-19T07:07:31.547Z

How would you do the voting part on forum here? Counting votes would be nightmare, as scrolling page unloads messages. And manually tabulating 50+ votes, or veryfying that count would be obnoxious.

nukeador · 2022-08-19T10:29:39.304Z

Please check this topic and how voting work on Discourse, there is a special widget/form that can be placed on the first post with multiple options

Votes on Discourse This Site Feedback

Discourse polls have some additional settings that are described here:

markkerrigan · 2022-08-20T20:46:31.717Z

Thanks all for the replies. One of the main issues I have with the wiki talk pages is some of the discussions are old. Also it’s just another fragmented place inbox to check. This is part of a larger problem, but it appears discussions on the wiki talk pages may not be as moderated. A forum allows for defined ways to flag inappropriate behavior which is either outright hostile or not welcoming to new mappers. The fact the wiki account is a separate account means the audience for who participates is artificially limited. Discussions on the wiki and other platforms are rather siloed from each other. By being more intentional with structuring the community discussions I believe this will create a more open and welcoming space.

dónal · 2022-08-21T15:23:29.932Z

The fact the wiki account is a separate account…

Grant indicated during his talk at SotM 2022 that single-sign-on is part of the vision. So that issue should go away at some point.

stevea · 2022-08-22T23:31:56.101Z

I am encouraged, even somewhat excited, by the many forward thrusts I see here and elsewhere in OSM: the leveraging of OAuth “single-sign on” already existing here and possibly being extended to wiki, improvements Minh mentioned (now in beta), better linkages to discussions / indexing / cross-referencing (because this is complex, longer-term and has time to both be vetted and developed / understood by present and future users of it). And more.

Yet, we’re also building the road while moving forward on it. Let’s remember that and allow realistic development of these rather visionary (and doable, though with effort, and, as they are consensus-driven, not quick…) improvements allowing realistic time-frames (years) to deploy them. People who should and do know what they’re/we’re doing have many strategies, including gathering wish-lists / feature-requests like some suggestions / frustrations here. These will bear fruit, though, let’s be real, over a more medium-term timeframe.

Let’s keep up the good discussion, yes, continuing on into the years (and decades!) ahead, and OSM and its communication platforms will continually better serve ourselves and our mapping efforts. Earth wasn’t mapped in a day (we are 18 years old, call OSM a “young adult” project!) and neither have been nor will be our communication tools. I’ll say (as a 13-year Contributor) “so far, so good.” And we have lots of room to grow.