Friday, January 19, 2007

User Contributions vs Wiki Editing

One of the coolest things about the new user contributions feature is wiki editing -- you can actually put up a map and have your community edit it like they would a text-based wiki. As the map owner, you can moderate all of the contributions.

This is a difficult concept to explain in the tool itself, especially since we're trying to avoid clutter and keep Atlas super-clean.

To demonstrate the difference between the two types of editing, I'm posting another version of the Northeastern University map I posted on Tuesday. The one in today's post is identical to the one in Tuesday's post, except wiki-editing is enabled (this option is listed under "Edit Map Properties").

If you click "Contribute to This Map" on the map in this post, you'll see you can click on any point on the map and edit it. In the map from Tuesday, you can still "Contribute to This Map", but you can only add points. You can't edit existing points.

2 comments:

david silver said...

excellent feature.

before reading this post, i wasn't sure what the difference was between the two options. now i do.

with a google search i found a picture of a cappy's pizza pie on flickr and added it with ease. i like how the image dimensions are now automated.

is there a way to keep track of a) who is adding contributions and b) when they are adding contributions? in other words, similar to wikipedia, it would be nice to have a map history.

Rick Burnes said...

Right now, the only way to keep track of who's adding what is via the moderate function.

Of course, that doesn't give the whole history of changes. That's something we'll have to build out.

First, though, we need to work on improving the UI of the contributions popup. Right now, we think it's a bit confusing for people.

Rick