Here’s the most recent discussion on the talk-us mailing list (crossposted to talk-ca). It sounds like natural=coastline is indeed preferred by the community.

The Wikipedia community does this kind of outreach via public user talk pages, which has tradeoffs. It prevents multiple users from spamming the new user exactly the same way (which is probably a good kind of problem to have anyhow), makes it easy to have small group conversations, and makes it clear when a lot of talking is happening. On the other hand, the private message system here on osm.org is great for one-on-one guidance, especially for timid users who’d rather not post their first-day questions for all to see. So a checklist tool would help to make sure no one falls through the cracks. (I just hope no one decides to then automate the process with bots the way Wikipedia has!)

Beyond the initial mentor system, I agree with Omnific that we need a better communication channel for the kinds of groups that form around a city or (in less-mapped countries) a region. None of the mappers in my area are willing to spam the country list about regional issues, and I think casual mappers would be more willing to join a Web-based discussion group than subscribe to a mailing list or join an IRC channel. Offsite services like Facebook have very little visibility on osm.org. An OSM wiki page might work for this purpose if it were federated with OSM logins and made it easier to follow discussions (like with the Echo extension Wikipedia uses).

I often wish there was a way to look at a map and filter on the type of POI. Perhaps I want to look at all restaurants or all schools.

ITO Map has domain-specific maps for this kind of thing. If you’re interested in accessing the raw data, overpass turbo has a wizard that generates basic queries for you and allows you to visualize the results.

smsm1: I’ve been mapping in areas that have enough work left to do that even removing tiger:reviewed=no tags is too tedious. However, it does sound like really well-mapped communities will eventually want some way to periodically mark features as reverified without making perfunctory edits.

rayKiddy: I was writing about San José proper. Some of the Peninsula cities are reasonably well-mapped, as you’ve observed. I wonder why such a gap in coverage developed between San José and its suburbs.

The issue of boundaries comes up on the talk-us mailing list fairly regularly. Some mappers have advocated mapping special-purpose districts (like school districts), while others have argued that boundaries generally should not be in OpenStreetMap. The disagreement arises because you can’t always spot a border on the ground to verify it, unlike much of the data in OSM. In the case of city limits, you can almost always find a marker along the road; by contrast, school district boundaries are rarely marked. (Fire districts sometimes are, depending on the jurisdiction.) Personally, I wouldn’t really mind seeing school districts mapped as boundary=school relations, but expect a lively discussion when you are ready to formally propose importing this data.

Potlatch 2 is still unusable in Shumway due to missing text input support (GitHub issue, Bugzilla).

That color matrix image is gorgeous, by the way.

Interesting choice of silver shields for highway=tertiary. Have you applied the same shield style to lower-classed roads, like highway=unclassified? The current style (bold label with no shield) is far too prominent anyways.

This is probably not technically feasible for this version, but road signage (shields) should be rendered based on the local colour scheme.

skjul, that’s not unlike what I’ve requested here. It isn’t a simple task, though.

Thank you for the detailed comparisons. Overall, I think the changes make the map less flat, which is especially important in areas with detailed landuse coverage.

The new highway colors are definitely growing on me¹, but I find the highway shields to be overly prominent in the new style. It may just be my monitor’s color gamma, but I find the motorway shields to be difficult to stare at for more than two seconds. I don’t think they need to be more saturated than the highways they label, because the shields already have a white outline that keeps them well-defined even in a sea of motorways.

In the first set of screenshots, Antwerp is inundated with railroads even out to z7. Did these screenshots incorporate the railroad service changes shown later? Most of the extraneous Antwerp railroads appear to be tagged service=yard, so they shouldn’t show up until much later.

¹ For context, I hail from the United States, where paper maps sometimes use similar colors anyways.
² Fairly recent Mac Retina display, default color profile.

FWIW it is not an universal standard for signs either - there is probably some kind of EU regulation for blue signs but traditionally many countries use green - like Italy, Turkey, USA, China.

Blue is still familiar in the U.S., despite the use of green signage, because most motorways are Interstates, and Interstate shields have a blue background. However, print maps in the U.S. may use any number of colors: blue, red, yellow, and green are all common.

lrhill may look like an importer, but they’re actually a very methodical building mapper doing it all by hand in iD. (That’s no exaggeration: every single edit is via iD.)

It may be worth double-checking each of the accounts listed in the spreadsheet against the “Used OSM Editors/Programs” section of HWYC. It’s unlikely that iD, Potlatch, or Potlatch 2 is being used for large-scale imports.

Matt Toups is the real deal. He used a separate account for the NOLA building import.

landuse=residential areas are good for trailer parks, housing projects, apartment complexes, and suburban subdivisions – named areas dominated by residential land use that wouldn’t be divided into smaller named areas. If these areas must have a place tag, place=neighbourhood sounds reasonable. place=neighbourhood is also good for things like urban mixed-use developments.

From what I’ve seen, some of the GNIS POIs should really be place=suburb, corresponding to a major division of a city, but you’d need local knowledge (or a little research online) to know that.

Then you’ve got oddballs like Twenty Mile Stand and Socialville: essentially unincorporated hamlets in the midst of massive urban sprawl. I’ve considered retagging them as place=surburb or even highway=junction but haven’t done anything with them yet. They’re still signposted like hamlets and function as landmarks for motorists. I wouldn’t mind seeing them as part of iD’s minimap, even if they’re included in an urban polygon.

@Omnific: West Virginia is a state with poor data quality. It hasn’t gotten much better over the years because Yahoo! and Bing imagery was always very poor in this area. Now with USDA and Mapbox imagery there’s an opportunity for better armchair mapping. Every time I accidentally find that my editor is in Appalachia – Eastern Kentucky and Southeast Ohio are just as bad – I have to budget a few extra hours for the inevitable roaming realignment party.

In this case, it was reported as #1035.

By the way, when you notice rendering oddities on the main osm.org map, be sure to report the bug to the openstreetmap-carto developers.

Yay for tag memory! Can’t wait for an undelete function so I can finally switch over from Potlatch 1. :^P

The standard practice in OpenStreetMap is to write out the names in full; routers and other software built atop OSM is then expected to understand the abbreviations. For example, if you name a street “Main Street”, Nominatim (the search engine at openstreetmap.org) will find it if you search for “main st” or “main st.” If you know of a common abbreviation that Nominatim doesn’t recognize, please propose it. For uncommon abbreviations, use the short_name or alt_name key. (In iD, expand the “All tags” section.)

Best release ever!

You’ll probably get more attention from the developers if you open an issue at GitHub for your feature request.