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Openstreetmap-Carto – Democracy Or anarchy?

For start: I am not going to claim that OSM Carto development works well or that it currently works at all.


But in general:

Can you list some software or cartography or sysadmin or config presets projects, used in OSM ecosystem, running as a democracy?

Why in some areas of our community project do we have total autocracy instead of democracy?

That is actually fairly normal. There are various projects, run (or not run) by various people with various rules.

People are free to use that work if they wan. People running this projects are not entitled that people will continue to use them.

Projects on open license can be forked if someone wants and is convinced that they can run project better or in a different way.

Running projects like this on pure democracy is unlikely to work well and I am not aware of successful examples.

Democracy is a good methods to run government, not a projects such as software projects. Or cartography or sysadmin or config presets projects.


Note: I am one of OSM Carto maintainers, almost inactive. Out of some reasons why I am inactive:

  • I implemented most of what I wanted and could improve
  • lack of time (though I guess I could drop some time-wasters of lower utility)
  • people kept trying to use OSM Carto to force their pet tagging schemes on others, bypassing discussions
  • people were unhappy, no matter which decision I have taken (see also the first point)
  • people were unhappy also if no decision was taken
Archaeological Discovery

Is there any indicator how old it is?

Archaeological Discovery

Congratulations!

Some StreetComplete-Statistics

IMO the number of quests solved, “stars”, are saved centrally on a server from WNO.

It is recorded in changeset tags, not on central server operated by Tobias. Sooner or later statistics server will be restarted and reload data from changesets by parsing past user edits.

At the same time data displayed by SC right now is supplied by this central server operated by Tobias.

Old changesets by SC with version <X are not parsed. If you still had the stars in your app when version X was introduced, they were used as start value instead of 0 stars.

This is likely to be true.

Some StreetComplete-Statistics

Stars are not exactly saved - all edits ever made are parsed based on public changeset info.

But maybe SC cannot parse such old edits?

Some StreetComplete-Statistics

Thanks for analysis!

The evaluation showed, one third of the users did not solve a single quest that was disabled by default.

Is it possible that it counts users who solved now disabled quests when they were enabled by default? For example roof shape quest was disabled recently.

What does "privacy" mean for OpenStreetMap?

osm.wiki/Why_we_won’t_delete_roads_on_private_property and osm.wiki/Limitations_on_mapping_private_information are relevant here (mostly in “Privacy status quo” context)

Some StreetComplete-Statistics

Few people are responsible for the majority of all solved quests.

Note that it is true for editing also with other editors (with JOSM to even greater degree if someone fails to exclude imports).

Some StreetComplete-Statistics

I am using different devices and i “lost” stars in the beginnings of the app due to reinstalls or simply using another device.

Note that stars may reappear after delay but they are not lost by changing devices.

Szlaki turystyczne - renderowanie w Overpass Turbo

O, bardzo udane! Dzięki za podzielenie się tym.

Myślałeś by to gdzieś na wiki podlinkować?

Motorway Junction Node Placement

Approach 2 example presented here is not problematic as turn lane is very short

But it gets blatantly wrong when turn lane is much longer (hundreds of meters, sometimes more on motorways).

Neither of examples presented in the post has both

(1) preserving geometry of link road (2) avoiding fake sharp angles (3) mapping turn lane as a separate carriageway

osm.org/user/daniel-j-h/diary/43148#comment40737 is almost matching what I consider as standard. Though I would likely put just a bit to right to fully preserve geometry of link road. Or move nodes on link road a bit from centerline to achieve similar effect.

osm.wiki/File:Theoretical_gore_tagging_3.png is for me representing proper mapping.

Motorway Junction Node Placement

Discussion on this topic restarted in osm.wiki/Talk:Proposed_features/Add_a_systhematic_location_to_put_the_merging_node_when_merging_exit_ramps_on_motorways_or_other_highways

How to chide users for their wiki edits

Yay, long standing problem of too much positivity on OSM Wiki will be finally solved!

Find facilities which are missing an opening_hours tag but have a website tag

How osm.wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_API_by_Example#.C2.AB_n_.C2.BB_adjacent_ways exactly works?

What complete(4) is doing there? I changed to complete(1) with hope of understanding the query but results still confuse me.

osm.wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_QL#The_block_statement_complete indicates that it is a loop count, but

( way(111435507); complete(1) { way(around:0)[highway~"."][highway!~"path|track|cycleway|footway"]; }; ); out geom;

includes not only osm.org/way/111435507 and directly connecting osm.org/way/111435449 but also osm.org/way/111435478

Nowości w projekcie mapy AED na dzień 13-02-2022

(to konto wyżej jest moje)

Nowości w projekcie mapy AED na dzień 13-02-2022

Na osm.wiki/Pl:Tag:emergency%3Ddefibrillator tego nie ma, gdzieś indziej ma sens jeszcze sprawdzić?

Nowości w projekcie mapy AED na dzień 13-02-2022

permissive - Urządzenie ma bardzo ograniczony dostęp, na co dzień dla pracowników np. w domu opieki w przypadku zagrożenia życia.

access=permissive ma inne znaczenie!

access=permissive oznacza to samo co access=yes, tyle że zgoda ta w każdym momencie może być wycofana!

Mapa AED - Podsumowanie na dzień 06.02.2022 - Trochę statystki

Mappers do not think about maintenance.

I just added one more thing to StreetComplete: it will ask whether old defibrillators are still present. Added in https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/commit/f822241d5827beffa8f5cce717a64ce079298076

Deprecated or duplicate tagging schemes in use are not critical issues

These annoyances stack up and at some point you as a data consumer start asking yourself “is it even worth trying to use OSM data?”.

I agree, and I am not claiming that it is always a bad idea. Just that distorting situation and claiming that it is the largest problem ever is simply incorrect.

And it is necessary to be aware that existing data consumers processing OSM data are not happy about retaggings which force them to start supporting new tags, just to hadle things which were covered by deprecated tagging.

Even if such changes would be overall justified - current data users are going to be the grumpiest as they have all negatives without positives.

Deprecated or duplicate tagging schemes in use are not critical issues

In general I expect that if someone organized mapping campaign, let other people that something specific was worth mapping - then it is the reason for more objects being mapped.

Not retagging itself. And that the same growth would be achieved without retagging.