"View this and other nearby images on: OpenStreetMap"

Just the other day I was browsing e.g.,

and I saw this link,
20240418T161235
and I clicked it, and…
Well, you click it and see if you are happy to where it takes you.

And answer if where it takes you is where you expected, considering the “brand name” it uses.

Yes, one can indeed explain away that in one way it is telling the truth about where it will take you. But then one needs to define what OpenStreetMap is.

All I know is if they did the same with Google Maps they would be getting a letter from lawyers rather soon.

Maybe
https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Trademark_Policy
does already clearly cover this case. I’m not sure.

Before invoking anything as formal as the trademark policy, perhaps suggest an improvement on the template’s talk page or perhaps the village pump.

1 Like

@multichill are you the same person who last edited the wikimedia coordinates module?
If yes, could you fix the lines 129 and 130 in the code section?
I guess thats the origin of the wrong URLs.

I am saying that I expected to be taken to https://www.openstreetmap.org/ , not some other website.

At least here they treat the trademark with more respect, not sending the user to a 3rd party website.

@Minh_Nguyen I was thinking I would first ask here on OSM. If everybody thinks what they are doing is hunky dory, then I will not pursue it further.

It seems like the purpose of the link is to make it easier to find nearby Commons images. This is functionality that osm.org doesn’t provide. Nevertheless, the map is based on OSM data. Would you favor keeping the link as is but with a different label?

4 Likes

It’s the data, not the particular map.

4 Likes

While I suppose Wikimedia Maps would be more accurate link text, I can’t say I really see a problem for OSM here. If Wikimedia Maps only used some OSM data, combined with mostly data from other sources then this would be deceptive. However, it appears that Wikimedia Maps is made mostly, if not entirely, from OSM data. So there is a slightly innacurate link on every Wikimedia Commons geotagged image page raising awareness of the OpenStreetMap trademark. Seems like a positive for OSM overall despite being slightly confusing.

8 Likes

Well OK then. I’ll just look the other way. Thanks everybody.

Great point! Perhaps we should suggest renaming “OpenStreetMap” to “OpenStreetData.” :smile:

3 Likes

We also have information about closed streets, just FYI. :wink:

4 Likes

Module:Coordinates - Wikimedia Commons and the next line link to tools like WikiMap that seem to work fine. What “fix” would you propose?

Wikimedia has been hosting copies of OSM for 10+ years with https://maps.wikimedia.org/ being the most stable one. It’s so Wikimedia handles the traffic, which can be quite a lot. This also makes it possible to embed the map without sending user traffic to a third party website (which https://www.openstreetmap.org/ is for Wikimedia).

OK, I hit your Wikimap link, and, well,
Screenshot 2024-04-22 22.56.39
[sounds like Cheech and Chong over the ham radio:]

What’s the name of that road?

8 4.

10-4?

No, 8-4.

8-4?

Roger. Over and out.

Anyway if I made a link OpenStreetMap which actually pointed to an inferior map, I would think it was making my brand name look bad. Users need confidence that clicking a link called OpenStreetMap will give consistent quality.

Here we see we end up with different browser tabs,
Screenshot 2024-04-22 23.08.55
so if I were in charge I would tell them if their own name is good enough for their page <title> then it should be good enough for their page link…