5 ms·

It's called Wikidata.

resolutebat 3y ago
Wikidata is not meant for random restaurant listings. OpenStreetMap will happily accept them though.
solardev 3y ago
It's not very useful to have that in a separate place compared to in Google Maps, which consolidates reviews, official business info (closures), traffic, transit, how busy it is, etc.
- Larrikin 3y ago
  I was making the point that it is a complete waste of time to contribute your free time to a corporation that will use your efforts for profit and give you nothing. One of the better things about the old internet was the collaborative effort to build up information, but we should not contribute to closed systems anymore. If Google or Apple wants that information they can figure out how to get it themselves or pay users. It's not our duty to help them scale
  - solardev 3y ago
    On one hand, I understand the desire for that, from a sustainable open-data perspective. Any day, Google can decide to close off/enshittify Google Maps (as has already started to happen with location-based ads). However, until and unless that happens, I still find tremendous value in Google Maps, as do many people I know. > It's not our duty to help them scale No, but editing Google Maps also helps a ton of real users, even if Google also happens to profit from it. For the last two decades, Google Maps has been free and used by millions (billions?) of people around the world, myself and most of my friends and family included. More than any other similar service (OSM, TripAdvisor, Yelp, OrganicMaps, county/city GIS, Apple Maps, in-car GPS, standalone GPS, etc.), this has been my go-to mapping & location service, and IMHO it is Google's single best service. Simply put, they do a REALLY good job at it, and it provides unparalleled accuracy and ease of use. The crowdsourced corrections part of it is huge, and not that different from us contributing our opinions here on HN (also a for-profit corporation), or reviewing things on Yelp/Metacritic/whatever, or providing our Android traffic data, etc. Yes, corporations profit from all of that, but they still provide valuable community services. I've seen local businesses gain customers after I updated their listing, delivery drivers find their way after I corrected misplaced pins, etc. It affects and improves my local communities, even as Google profits. Editing OSM doesn't do that, because nobody I know uses it. For me this isn't about "duty" or purity of ethics, just about having a useful & good app to find places and get to them. Again, it's a network effect... it is useful to edit Google Maps because everyone else uses it, and edits it, and in so doing we have a accurate global POI database unmatched by any other effort. Nobody obliges you to use Google Maps. But I'm a very happy user of it, and would gladly pay for it if it weren't free (in fact I wish they offered a paid plan to skip the ads). Do I wish it were a FOSS product run by a nonprofit? Sure. But OSM hasn't caught up in two decades, and it probably won't in my lifetime... if anything the gap between it and Google keeps getting bigger, as Maps gets more and more features and OSM falls further and further behind =/

Wikidata is not meant for random restaurant listings. OpenStreetMap will happily accept them though.

It's not very useful to have that in a separate place compared to in Google Maps, which consolidates reviews, official business info (closures), traffic, transit, how busy it is, etc.

Larrikin 3y ago
I was making the point that it is a complete waste of time to contribute your free time to a corporation that will use your efforts for profit and give you nothing. One of the better things about the old internet was the collaborative effort to build up information, but we should not contribute to closed systems anymore. If Google or Apple wants that information they can figure out how to get it themselves or pay users. It's not our duty to help them scale
- solardev 3y ago
  On one hand, I understand the desire for that, from a sustainable open-data perspective. Any day, Google can decide to close off/enshittify Google Maps (as has already started to happen with location-based ads). However, until and unless that happens, I still find tremendous value in Google Maps, as do many people I know. > It's not our duty to help them scale No, but editing Google Maps also helps a ton of real users, even if Google also happens to profit from it. For the last two decades, Google Maps has been free and used by millions (billions?) of people around the world, myself and most of my friends and family included. More than any other similar service (OSM, TripAdvisor, Yelp, OrganicMaps, county/city GIS, Apple Maps, in-car GPS, standalone GPS, etc.), this has been my go-to mapping & location service, and IMHO it is Google's single best service. Simply put, they do a REALLY good job at it, and it provides unparalleled accuracy and ease of use. The crowdsourced corrections part of it is huge, and not that different from us contributing our opinions here on HN (also a for-profit corporation), or reviewing things on Yelp/Metacritic/whatever, or providing our Android traffic data, etc. Yes, corporations profit from all of that, but they still provide valuable community services. I've seen local businesses gain customers after I updated their listing, delivery drivers find their way after I corrected misplaced pins, etc. It affects and improves my local communities, even as Google profits. Editing OSM doesn't do that, because nobody I know uses it. For me this isn't about "duty" or purity of ethics, just about having a useful & good app to find places and get to them. Again, it's a network effect... it is useful to edit Google Maps because everyone else uses it, and edits it, and in so doing we have a accurate global POI database unmatched by any other effort. Nobody obliges you to use Google Maps. But I'm a very happy user of it, and would gladly pay for it if it weren't free (in fact I wish they offered a paid plan to skip the ads). Do I wish it were a FOSS product run by a nonprofit? Sure. But OSM hasn't caught up in two decades, and it probably won't in my lifetime... if anything the gap between it and Google keeps getting bigger, as Maps gets more and more features and OSM falls further and further behind =/