Hi, sorry you had a bad experience.

Just a few thoughts, for some people, they want there to be a chilling effect, they don’t want imports to be as easy and streamlined. I’m not one of those people, but I’d lean close to that way.

It’s not up each city/county/state to import the data, an independent mapper can do it. If you’ve done a few of them, it gets easier and you know what to do. For an experienced mapper, the import guidelines aren’t too strenuous.

You could even combine many county datasets into one large dataset and import that! There’s no requirement that there is only one source dataset. That is harder because then there are many copyright and data quality issues to confirm.

If a city has 30 new addresses, surely it’s easier for someone to manually add them to OSM, then you don’t need an import!

It would seem rather that a prominent individual within the community has created an account that is solely dedicated to a vigilante style role of cleaning up what he describes as vandalism and what he deems to be bad imports and mechanical edits.

Yes, people make separate accounts for data clean up work like that. “vigilante” is a little strong, OSM is kinda anarchistic, everyone’s a vigilante!

Minor one: for gender you have “Prefer not to say” twice, weird that.

I’m not sure what you could do about education system. Apparently there’s a European Qualifications Framework which might help you rank different qualifications. Maybe link to it? (But people would probably have to look it up)

OSM notes can be added by people on the website, and some apps make use of notes (Maps.me creates a note when a user says a POI doesn’t exist anymore). It’s good to clear through the notes in your local area to stay on top of things.

OSM Wiki has more

Hi! Welcome! These diary entries are for communicating with the community! You wrote something, and I’m able to read it and reply! Let’s get talking and learn from each other!

Be sure to only trace from our approved aerial imagery (and some old maps). No tracing from Google Maps please! You can also just go out into the world and add things you see with your eyes, it’s not all tracing!

OSM doesn’t have moderators for map edits, when you add/change/delete something, it shows up immediately. (Don’t worry it’s not hard to undo (or revert) a mistake!). If you want feedback on changes, or are unsure how to do something, you can make a diary entry like this and people might comment.

Looks good so far! Do you know about HistOSM which displays historic items from OSM? Remember you can always add many languages to OSM, and include more than just the english name.

One advantage of the OSM key-value is that you can use new values, and data consumers will be able to simplify it by just using the key. So if you’re working with buildings, you don’t have to have a special rule for building=gazebo and can just generalise it to building. You’re approach wouldn’t allow that.

This opens the other idea of going the other way. Currently we have 2 item tagging key, value. You’re suggesting having 1 or 2 item tagging: key, value and just value. But maybe we should have multiple value tagging, so you could have multi-level tagging as much as you need. You could tag a church as religion-christian-catholic, or shop-clothes-male-suits (rather than our current shop=clothes, clothes=male and then I dunno how you’d tag suits). This way someone could simplify as much as they want, shop, or shop-clothes or shop-clothes-male etc.

I don’t think this’ll happen though, the current system is good enough. ;)

I was a little annoyed previously at all of keepright’s false positives,

IME most of them that I see in Ireland are not false positives. You can turn on/off each check, so things like “open polygon” are nearly always a problem, and then only work on specific problems. If you turn off checks which are unhelpful in your area, then you’ll reduce the false positives you see.

I’m wary of promoting “free cloud hosting of data”, since OSM doesn’t allow you to put anything you want in there. It’s one global database, and if you put your custom data into it, people can (and probably will) just delete. OSM Isn’t just a data storage service.

There’s loads of Maps.me notes that don’t contain any useful information at all, besides the default Maps.me text

Maps.me has been updated to include more data example.

How did you find out?

I would also add options like “I checked on Google Maps”, and then if the user selects that, the note silently gets deleted. 🙂

I’m very interested in StreetComplete, and have made a few edits. It’s great to see new tools and user friendly ways to improve OSM.

I too am looking forward to more “quests” (i.e. types of change/edit), and the ability to add custom ones would be great.

That seems to have been changed already? And you can just edit the map yourself. :)

Welcome! and Happy Mapping!

You can propose a change to the map style on openstreetmap.org by filling an issue at this link: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/new

This is great! Some of it is newer imagery than what we had before (Bing & Mapbox), so I was able to add some new things. It’s fantastic that we have another source for aerial imagery! 🙌🎉🎆

Welcome! Let’s get mapping

In 13th Century England the following two, apparently contradictory, statements are both true:– Most people were born, lived & died within the same 5 mile (8km) radius. England was covered with a network of streets & roads each many hundreds of miles long; further, these streets & roads were continually thronged with people travelling long distances upon them.

So those aren’t necessarily contradictory. One simple solution: 90% of the population was born/lived/died in their home village, and 10% of the population went all over the country.

You’re kinda blowing my mind with some of those projections…. Fascinating stuff!

At State of the Map 2016 Frederik Ramm gave a talk about mechanical edits. (video here). You should watch it, it’s very relevant to what you’re talking about. He specifically gives examples of typos in common tags like building. He’s not in favour of automated edits like you suggest, claiming the strength of OSM is having humans looking at things and fixing them, and mechanical edits are not like that.

I’d suggest a MapRoulette task to fix up these things if you’d like. You will then have people looking at the area around the problem and can probably find a better fix than what the bot would do.

I suppose one reason Wikipedia has more bots is because Wikipedia is edited with a plain text box, so it’s easy to make typos or simple mistakes. But OSM has software for editing, so people often use presets, rather than having to type in building=yes all the time. This probably reduces the error rate of mappers.

Me personally, I wouldn’t be opposed to mass changing it. However, as you point out, it’s not a lot of instances of this problem, so it wouldn’t be too hard to just use MapRoulette.

I agree. OSM must only contain real, verified data. And some Pokemon Go users don’t do that. But people have been adding nonsense data to OSM since the dawn of time (2004).

You can donate data and wait when somebody will pick it up:

Wikidata is CC0 “Public domain” licenced. This data is OSM derived, so you can’t import it into Wikidata. I also won’t donate my data to a non-share-alike, corporate friendly licence like CC0.