While sorting some photographs I took this summer, I noted that many towns and villages in the Bodenseekreis, Baden-Württemberg, have still rather poor town maps in our OpenStreetMap. I try to improve at least some of them, because I have to look for street names, important buildings (like churches) etc. anyway when sorting my photographs. The sources for all these changes are a) printed maps and town maps, b) the Bing photograph, c) my memories, photographs and notes.
[Postscript: the wording of the previous sentence gives a wrong impression, therefore some clarification is necessary: I did NOT copy any parts of printed maps or town maps – this would be illegal –, my changes are completely based on the Bing aerial images and on my own photographs, notes about street names etc. and memories. I just took a look at some printed maps to double-check if I understand my own notes and interpret my photographs and the Bing images correctly.]
Please don’t shout at me if I do something not perfectly correctly; if you happen to live in that nice landscape yourself, please be gentle with some errors of a pure tourist and improve the maps ;–) But some areas of our maps are so bad (see, for example, the town map of Rickenbach, a district of Salem, before I changed it: most streets and all street names were missing!), that even if I make some errors while changing the map it will be still far better than not changing that bad map areas at all.