Wiki minimization

Communities ישראל (Israel)
1

I pushed a big change to the Wiki today. See the diff here. The table of contents now only has 3 levels! And I think the wiki retains its usefulness and nothing substantial was lost.

This is unrelated to the naming guidelines update that was also performed recently.

Background

The IL wiki is huge. In the past month or so, I’ve been trying to minimize it by rewording, removing redundancies or out of date info, moving stuff to subpages, and using slimmer templates.

Goal:

  • Wiki having only useful and up to date information
  • Move periphery information that is seldom looked at to sub-pages
  • Smaller table of contents, and with fewer levels of nesting

Today I’ve taken a bold step and removed almost any tagging guideline that isn’t Israel-specific, as well as several more changes.

Please feel free to comment or raise objections.

2

I’m all in favor of simplifying the wiki page, and thank you for putting in the work!

I haven’t reviewed it thoroughly yet, but so far the changes you made look good to me. Some things like how to tag road types will have to stay, as that differs between regions worldwide - I see you left those in, which is good.

You moved the boundaries to a separate wiki page - Israel/lists/boundaries - OpenStreetMap Wiki - this is probably a good move, but I personally find this list really useful so perhaps the link to it can be made more prominent? Like, maybe it could be one of the first things on the page. I think the definition of the area and the divisions of it is important enough to be mentioned first.

3

I’ve removed the sidebar. It looks much better on mobile now :heart_eyes:. We have our own QA list section, and I never found the sidebar very useful. Some of its links are broken too (e.g. Wikimedia). We can salvage the good links and move them to the QA section.

Done.

4

Why? The sidebar is easy to skip on mobile and makes the page look like a place page. I don’t see a reason to do this.

5

I find it a distraction with little utility. Especially for a user visiting the page for the first time. Most of the links are duplicates of the QA list.

In any case, I’ve actually added a new flag to the place template, so re-adding it is a boolean, if the community prefers that. My personal taste is minimalism.

6

All the countries I’ve tried have a sidebar: Germany, France, England, and Wales.

I see no reason that the Israel wiki page would be different.

The wiki serves as our community “memory”. I would like to request that changes to the Israel wiki, except for very minor updates and corrections, will be discussed in advance in this forum.

1 Like
7

Understood. I have reverted the sidebar.

I think the only undiscussed major change right now is the removal of non Israel-specific tagging guidelines from the Wiki.