To increase community involvement and create an inclusive environment for all, I propose to add a subdomain to the OSM website with a multilingual implementation of the Switch2OSM project materials. I have prepared a working prototype (https://andygol.github.io/switch2osm-mkdocs/) that has been in operation for about two years and resolves the following issues:
I opted for MkDocs Materials, because it helps to do this with ease and have some extra features out of the box:
day/night theme switcher
search
syntax highlighting
info boxes
auto deployment and other
I’ve moved the content and cleaned up formatting of the source *.md files, and set up Transifex project to support translations. I neither copied the current design nor rewrote some outdated parts (like the part about using OpenLayers, which references an outdated version of the library, which makes the code used for the library not working).
What do you think about starting a project at https://switch2.osm.org (go2., move2., run.* — anything you want)?
Hello - maintainer of some of the content at switch2osm.org here.
For completeness, what I said last year still applies. The suggested PR to move to mkdocs, support translations by some unspecified mechanism and add a couple of new low-quality pages all in one go isn’t a good idea to do all in one.
Whether the switch2osm site is part of osm.org, a jekyll switch2osm.org site or a mkdocs switch2osm.org site I really don’t care. Right now it’s fairly easy to work on, and the “serving” content is at a level where people can basically start from scratch and get a (raster) tile server.
It would be absolutely great to have a way of (1) translating it into other languages, and (2) it would also be great to have some sort of “vector” content on there too, but that needs to be at the same level of quality as what’s already there (unfortunately, with a couple of notable exceptions, vector tile documentation for the various options is piss-poor). What is also important is that (3) it stays easily maintainable (and I get the impression that the regular osm.org site isn’t),
I think that moving to mkdocs is a great idea (it seems easier to set up than jekyll) , and that supporting translations is likewise (but how that is actually going to work needs to be explained, and so far it has not been).
The switch2osm PR stalled for a year waiting the PR to be split up so that mkdocs, translation and new content were separate, until this comment just now, but that seems a bit vague and doesn’t address the actual issue that was raised.
I’d like to respectfully suggest that we maintain our focus on the main discussion points. I believe it would be most productive if we set aside discussions about content quality at this time.
Regarding documentation, I think we can all agree that having some form of documentation—even if it may benefit from improvements—generally serves the community better than having none at all.
I would like to express my sincere appreciation to @SomeoneElse and the Switch2OSM contributors for their valuable work. Many of us have found these resources tremendously helpful, even as some aspects have naturally become dated over time. The topic of vector tiles appears to be generating significant interest, and I understand this presents certain challenges. As site maintainer, @SomeoneElse certainly has both the authority and prerogative to modify the content as deemed appropriate.
Regarding the proposed transition from Jekyll to McDocs, I previously suggested a potential work plan, though I notice the maintainers haven’t yet taken action in this direction.
If this plan seems viable, let’s proceed with its implementation!
While they haven’t formally expressed their views on this proposal, this lack of response might perhaps suggest other priorities at present.
My intention in raising these points is simply to encourage collaborative community effort on these matters.
Perhaps we might consider whether a multilingual version of Switch2OSM would be beneficial? If so, I wonder if this might be something we could approach together as a community project.
It would be particularly interesting in hearing thoughts from the CWG team on these matters.
To be clear - 12 months ago you were asked if you wanted to provide a PR that did one thing at a time but you have declined to do so.
I personally believe that it would be (and have said so numerous times) but you need to actually explain how the process will work, and if you’re basing that on mkdocs, you need to create a PR to merge that work and that work only first.
I’ve no problem with moving switch2osm to an openstreetmap.org domain but that doesn’t really integrate anything - it would still be a separate site just on a different domain. That’s fine because I don’t think there’s any need to integrate it.
Whether osm.org is easily maintainable isn’t really relevant given that as far as I can tell this isn’t actually proposing adding switch2osm to the osm.org code base - that’s just the impression given by the somewhat misleading title of this thread but it’s not really what seems to be being proposed here.
