That's great, Arabic is a major language but we haven't had a complete translation of it until now. Thanks for working on this.

If you're trying to counter propaganda it always helps not to introduce some more of it in the process.

Google's Map Maker Competition isn't "fraud" nor are people who use Map Maker "[giving] away their souls". It's made perfectly clear to everyone using Map Maker what they're signing up for and in some cases using Map Maker is a much better use of your time (at least in the short term) than using OpenStreetMap.

@RichardB: The point isn't that one trace is more reliable than any other, but supplying information about what traces you used for reference when making an edit.

Just upload the trace and add a tag to the changeset pointing to it.

Waldo000000: Not currently though, though perhaps something like that might result from the discussion currently ongoing on talk@ about this blog post of mine.

seav: ... around 5-10 cm. If you have that amount of relative accuracy you trace it and drag the entire data by 1-3 meters later as you get more accurate rectification points later.

seav: NearMap has an absolute accuracy of 1-3 meters but the relative accuracy of its imagery looks to be <5-10 cm. If you map imagery with such high relative accuracy accurately you can always drag the entire data by 1-3 later to give it the absolute accuracy you need.

seav/Jean-Marc Liotier: We already have aerial imagery accurate enough for this sort of thing. We're also likely to do a GIS import at some point where the GIS database has this sort of detail.

Are you interested in making your map translatable via Translatewiki?We already moved Potlatch & the OSM website over there, it would be relatively easy to add something new.

Translatewiki works better with translations where the key is an abstract thing like "ui_fixed_error" instead of the original English string like "Fixed Error".

Not as insane as some things we'll probably end up doing, like having full 3d polygon support :)

We'll probably see this soon enough with some GIS import or some diligent tracing of aerial imagery though.

Some users continue to advocate that sidewalks and other things associated with streets shouldn't be mapped separately at all and should be represented as tags on the street. That's fine to some degree but I wanted to point out that we can't get away with that forever if we want a detailed street-level map.

The whole neighborhood?

> But armchair mapping is not as good as real mapping.

How many people could you help if you mapped the entire planet from Landsat? Surely more than if you just did your city and surrounding areas.

We need both armchair and in-the-field mapping and would do well to encourage both activities. Some mappers are interested in one and not at all in the other.

The ESRI shapefile format has numerous .shp -> .osm conversion scripts so if they can export a shapefile that would be great.

Yes the GPX importer doesn't like those but you can edit them through JOSM. You could hack the track itself so the importer will accept it but I think it's just easier to upgrade Java and use JOSM instead.

Can't you just upgrade your Java installation? What operating system are you running?

And do you mean Potlatch won't take your GPX track which is exclusively waypoints with no track data?

I'm afraid not. JOSM keeps its data in memory. Sometimes it's possible on systems like Linux which support this to take a dump of memory right after this happens, I've managed to save e.g. browser forms this way. But for complex Java datastructures that JOSM uses it's going to take a lot more work than 3 hours of work to piece that together from a raw memory dump.

Did you note why JOSM crashed? Did it display a backtrace? If so (and in the future) you should file things like these in its bugtracker so that they won't happen in the future.

JOSM also has really good support for multiple changesets now and other things that make it easy to keep uploading data to the server without compromising the quality of your changesets or edit summaries. I rarely edit with JOSM for more than 10 minutes without uploading to the server now.

For what it's worth some of those blog postings are probably from countries where major highways still need to be mapped. Some people just aren't interested in mapping big things with little relevance to their personal lives and prefer to map things closer to them.

You can duplicate anything in the selection list. So just select the relation by going to the relation dialog and clicking the "Set the current relation to the list of selected relations" in the lower-right corner and then do Ctrl+D.

You could also use the search engine to find it & select it, e.g. by searching for "type:relation modified".

Did the aerial photo you used have appropriate licensing for use with OpenStreetMap? If so you should upload it to Wikimedia Commons.

Is the source for your script available? I have a similar database I haven't processed for Iceland. It might be interesting to render it like that.

It only has street names / postal codes though. Not house numbers.