@Omnific,

I have it already explained, but I can repeat it for you. For some experienced mapper, or even for a person, who just barely knows something about OSM, Maps.me is no worse than any other editor - I didn’t say anything opposite to this statement.

But it does have inherent issue: it allows certain amount of people, who know literally zero about OSM, to edit OSM database directly. They are not a part of community. They don’t even know that OSM community exists. This situation creates several types of wrong edits, barely (or even never) found in changesets made by other OSM editor applications.

Ups, sorry, messed up quotes a bit (damn Markdown). Last sentence in every quote is mine.

Let’s start from Railway page of OSM Wiki For urban passenger rail service you have three choices (except monorail): subway, tram, light_rail. For subway, corresponding page says: > The system should be completely separated from other traffic, usually underground So, it doesn’t fit SkyTrain, since it is separated, but rarely underground.

For tram, definition sounds like this: > This tag can be used for tracks which are mainly or exclusively used for trams, or where tram tracks are laid within a normal road open to all traffic, often called street running Definition is a kind of broad, but tram systems rarely have absolutely no portions shared with common road traffic, while SkyTrain is completely separated from it.

For light_rail, definition requires the following: > A mode of urban transportation utilizing predominantly reserved but not necessarily grade-separated rights-of-way. Electrically propelled rail vehicles operate singly or in trains. Sky train has reserved and grade-separated ways.

While there are words about fuzzy definitions, SkyTrain doesn’t seem to be a borderline case, where it’s hard to decide. It does have all main features of light rail, even at higher grade than Trimet MAX in Portland, Oregon (which is always referred as a light rail).

So, I have no idea why anyone would tag SkyTrain as subway (you can probably trace it back to original authors in object history and ask them).

Answering your question about navigation apps, since OSM has a rule “don’t map for navigator”, you shouldn’t really care about it, you should care about reflecting real world features with corresponding geometry and tags.

@SomeoneElse,

Title refers to some very simple thing: for certain period, Potlatch was known as an editor, most often used for unintentional relation damaging. Now, any Maps.me changeset is suspicious.

@saintam1,

It wouldn’t be just a figure of speech to say, that people, including OSM project members, are very different. And there are people with views like yours, who are okay with spending their time on “garbage collection” by own reasons. But the reality is that definitely not all OSM contributors are like you and it’s completely natural. Attitude is very individual thing and nobody can demand people to change it, since “not wasting own time in favor of people, who don’t actually care about OSM” is absolutely normal.

I’d also say that quote you mentioned doesn’t fit this situation, obviously. Simply because those contributors Linus was talking about were, at least, aware of what they doing. I mean, they knew, that it’s about Linux and so on. But in case of Maps.me, people are very often not aware of what’s happening. Reversing your analogy back to Linux development, it would turn into completely ridiculous situation: portions of Linux kernel source are, for example, showing up in people’s favorite opensource text editor with a prompt like “if you feel like something is wrong with it, feel free to edit it”, and the whole bunch of people, who have zero programming knowledge, just playing with that code, and then every edit turns into patch and pull request. Guess, how soon Linux developers will just quit. So, again, be careful with analogies, it’s too easy to transform something originally logical into fancy ideology.

@Zverik,

We have a release cycle of one month. Therefore we can’t fix out mistakes quickly, except for the big ones.

Isn’t it the first time you telling that (speaking of more or less proper public relations)? And what about tests, are you actually using them?

@Alan Trick,

Personally, I’m not into “hoping”, since often we can take in account certain visible tendencies. Here, tendencies are not good.

Changeset descriptions are automated, and “partial upload” means there are many objects changed or added. It doesn’t bother me much, if those edits are okay. But what bothers me, is that Maps.me generates constant flow of bad edits of similar nature, which means it’s preventable (unlike in case of random mistakes) and nobody actually did anything to assure community, that measures will be taken to address it.

One of fundamental concepts of OSM project is that it’s not a map (despite its name), but spatial database. Standard style on openstreetmap.org is more or less technical map style (however, maintainers trying to keep it usable not just for that). So, “OSM ≫ Standard map style”. There are probably thousands of widespread things not rendered by any common raster map servers (road lanes, for example).

I mean, Exit 26 ramp.

osm.org/directions?engine=osrm_car&route=14.38003%2C121.04107%3B14.38559%2C121.04256#map=17/14.38161/121.04364 - obviously, it doesn’t want to use right turn from Exit 29 ramp to Susana Heights Road. Check if there is common node and/or wrong restrictions for this right turn.

There is also this tool

According to different sources and tidal models, northern part of Indian ocean has some significant tidal range (difference between high and low tide). General convention for shoreline mapping is to use margin between land and water at mean high tide level. Keeping in mind that area you are talking about is basically a tidal flat, it is close to impossible to trace land accurately in accordance with that convention, since satellite image does not represent “medium high tide” level of water. Another thing is that it’s not just some tidal flat, but mud flat with non-uniform currents, so these “islands” are nothing more than temporary higher spots of constantly moving mud, which makes them “temporary” and “non-verifiable” features in terms of OSM core principles. It is easy to see, how those features are changing, using Google Earth historical imagery mode (we can’t trace it, but I can use it to proof my statement). So, as a bottom line, I wouldn’t map any minor mud islands in this area.

There is an important difference: when certain app is advertised as an “OSM editor”, mistakes made by its users have same nature as in case of general OSM contribution, because usage of this app to edit OSM is intentional.

But when it’s a “navigation app”, user’s main intention is to use it for navigation. He doesn’t necessarily want to contribute into any collaborative project in the first place. Lack of information leads to delusional ideas about purpose of built-in editor, such as: “giving feedback to professional map developers”, “making own notes”, “making reviews”, “doing whatever you want”, “editing local copy of map”. Therefore, it’s incorrect to assume, that it draws people away from contributing - in this case we don’t know, if particular people ever wanted to. And it’s wrong to think, that it’s possible to “trick” people into successful effective direct contributing without telling them a word about what the OSM is.

This is quite common situation, and not only in Malaysia. Personally, I haven’t seen “reviews” made by maps.me users in form of map edits (like some of those listed above), but I’ve seen quite a few “personal notes”. People don’t realize that making those edits they making all that information public - they either think it’s some sort of personal custom POI directory (many navigation systems have this feature) or that all edits are local. There is corresponding issue on GitHub describing this problem.

Fortunately, simon04 was so kind and quickly added editor tag filtering to his fork of WhoDidIt, so you can put “maps.me” into “editor” field and see only edits made by maps.me users to review all of them.

I can definitely tell, that some contributions made by maps.me users are good and don’t really need to be fixed, but in the same time, in areas I’m watching, other maps.me users are the main source of unclear and even rubbish data.

Bad side of this situation is that even being able to receive feedback (such as changeset comments and private messages), many of them are unaware of fact that they are OSM project participants, therefore, those messages seem strange, surprising and unwanted for them, since they only wanted to use free navigation program, not to receive complains and corrections regarding of their edits.

@Zverik,

Это всего лишь иллюстрирует традиционное непонимание того, что всякие эти bridleway, cycleway и так далее - всего лишь shortcut-ы для набора defaults. Пример - равнозначность обозначений:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=path https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:bicycle=designated https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:foot=designated
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=cycleway https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:foot=designated

Но это уже другая история. А почему любое сообщество имеет право понимать теги строже (но не свободнее) общего - я уже недавно объяснял в одной из прошлых записей.

If there are people worrying about rendering protected areas on osm.org Standard style, you can always use leisure=nature_reserve as secondary tagging scheme, which is not a mistake. However, rule “Don’t map for the renderer” is still there.

Good practice is to place abbreviations (like GKVK) into short_name= value.

@Zverik,

Добавил ссылку в первое упоминание тега. Ссылки на scrub, grassland и другие теги, которые обозначают более часто встречающиеся сущности, в статье про heath имеются в достаточном количестве. Пока еще никто не задал на форуме вопрос вроде: “Хорошо, это не heath, а что тогда?”

@ajvol,

Интересная история, не слышал.

Тут, очевидно, все определеннее - то, что о сущности пустошей российские пользователи, как правило, не имеют ни малейшего понятия, они уже доказали делом.

Sorry, I meant “img tag”, not “url tag”.