 On the eve of #OpenStreetMap's 20th anniversary, it is slightly upsetting to see the pivotal piece of software that stopped OSM from vanishing in to obscurity and that was, between 2006 and 2014, the 1st contact with editing OSM for most contributors, considered not-notable by @wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Potlatch_(software)&oldid=1019457995 11 comments
 @simon @SK53 @wikipedia @seav @edward Unfortunately It seems that redaction bot had its way with the featured "Terrace Theater" object and it has only been re-added a few months ago.  @simon @wikipedia @seav @edward A quick scan shows Wikipedia articles on occam, Ten15 and OSF's ANDF (latter two are the same thing), BCPL, Simula etc.. All were influential (not sure about Ten15), but had a small number of users mainly decades ago: in the main they deserve articles because they provide important historical context for later developments. This is not only true of Potlatch (for the conception of iD by @richardf), but it also had massively more users. @SK53 @wikipedia @seav @edward @richardf my guesstimate would be ~half a million users, which is a lot more than a -lot- of other "specialist" software. @InsertUser @SK53 @wikipedia @seav @edward @richardf wasn't deleted, instead the entry was redirected to the OpenStreetMap entry. If the content had been integrated in to that, it would have been OKish (except that the OSM article is really bad with lots of bloopers, but still better than the German one). @simon @wikipedia @seav @edward @richardf So possibly in the top five most popular pieces of GIS software, after iD, ArcGIS and QGIS. I've noticed that Wikipedia articles often have a strong recency bias, especially for corporations : the EMI Group article includes broad conglomerates of the original EMI and Thorn-EMI which had the current EMI business as a subsidiary generating no more than 25% of turnover. The sundry UK government radar research labs in Malvern are treated more rationally. @SK53 @simon @wikipedia @seav @edward @richardf I think the general trend in #Wikipedia is that anything relating to things that existed more than 10 years ago gets edited down bit by bit until it's a stub and then deleted as not notable because all the citations got lost in the edits. |
Gregory's Server
@simon @wikipedia @richlv @seav @edward Another example of the arbitrariness of Wikipedia.
I'd think TBL spending a minute or two in a TED talk in 2010 demonstrating editing with Potlatch, might suggest it had a huge cultural impact.