OpenStreetMap
Normally, I spent 30 to 90 minutes a day cycling, which results in another 30 to 90 minutes editing in JOSM. Yesterday, for the first time, I felt motivated to spend my whole day mapping. I cycled about 4 hours and spend another 4 hours in JOSM. Plus about 1 hour other mapping realted work, this is all I can do per day.
As some of you know (beacuse I tell this every time...) I use audio mapping which produces huge amounts of data that you can not see from the GPS track. I've done all the way from Wernigerode to Ilsenburg (white spot on the map till then), some streets there, and the way back via Drübeck and Darlingerode.
The OSM highscore list
When I now looked into the User statistics I read that this sums up to only 910 "edit points" (it does not say if it counts nodes or ways or tags...). Which gives me a "glorious" rank 43 for that single day. If I do this for the next 4 days, too, I might have a small chance to get into the top 60 mappers of the week, but wait a moment: There's a weekend in between!
Don't get me wrong, my main motivation for mapping is fun, then comes sport, then comes the need of a cycle map for this region, then the good feeling to share information, and then on rank 5 comes the "fame" to be in some list (which no one reads and which is gone tomorror). Other motivations to follow...
I understand that there are some users running automated cleanup bots or import scripts, but I guess there numver is finite. So how do they do this? To reach the score of, let's say "hogrod" I had to do audio mapping 37 hours per day :) And then this would get me on rank 14. Without the audio I would need about 60 hours to generate this amount of data.
Living streets / Lebende Straßen ;)
By the way, I am now using the new highway:living_street very frequently, and I hope that they will be in the T@H map really soon. Looks weired when there is an invisible street with several POIs and side roads on its invisible sides :) The ratio between the residential and living_streets is 3058:1 in the DB, but I guess it will soon reach high popularity. Here in Wernigerode, the ratio is 26:1 in the DB and maybe 18:1 in reality, because I'm not finished re- taggin these.
Discussion
Comment from Longbow4u on 2 February 2008 at 21:45
As for highscore, the week before Christmas I managed to get into the highscore for the week. The answer how is simple: Satellite mapping. I mapped swathes of forest between Rhine and A45 Frankfurt-Köln. Other people do upload Tiger data.
So no mystery here. Don*t be disappointed. What counts is quality not quantity.
Longbow4u
Comment from NicRoets on 3 February 2008 at 12:47
I was never able to get very high on the highscore list, even though I mapped hundreds of square kilometers with Yahoo! images. No points for actually visiting the streets and adding the names. No points for avoiding duplicate nodes when drawing intersections thereby enabling proper routing.
A better highscore system will be retrospective : If you upload a node / way and no member of the community revises it for the next few years, it was most likely quality work.
Comment from Richard on 5 February 2008 at 16:38
And I've always had a small bee in my bonnet that, although I've probably covered as many miles with my GPS as anyone, I tend to do a lot of cross-country stuff with the eTrex set to "auto" rather than "every 1s" - so I never get onto the GPS leaderboards...
But yes, as above: quality, not quantity.