Obviously this means we can blame Potlatch for the spam!

Heh. :p
If you need another hand to weed through spam, I could do that.

Here you go: osm.wiki/index.php/Beginners'_Guide
Welcome aboard and have fun!

Right, I just spent an hour browsing and searching the mailing lists and read up on this.
This seems to be the "best" discussion of it http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2008-May/026305.html

It all boils down to this: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2008-May/026326.html
"This is one of religious discussions - both sides KNOW they are right,
and no amount of discussion is going to change things. Unless we have
a central decision making force of some sort lay down the law, (in OSM
- hah!) you'll continue to see things mapped both ways."

So I will add an disclaimer to my post and happily continue mapping and advertising to map like this.

Yes, you can edit it. In JOSM the "unglue node" tool might be what you are looking for.

Uh-oh. :(
Care to leave some pointers or links?

I joined this project rather recently (well, almost 10 months ago now and before the big german waves). The fascination was mostly the "hacker" thought behind it. "There is nothing as free as we want it, so let's build it ourselves" or something like that. Plus I used GPS a lot (Geocaching, Sailing), have too much free time and sit too much infront of my computer. Oh, and being outside on foot or with my bike is fun, OSM gave me more motivation for it. ;)

Oh, and also being able to map better than the other maps. Adding those footways only the locals know etc. That's always motivating.

If you have specific questions or I can help you in any way, just shout.

Nice to have you onboard. Welcome!

Of course you have to adapt or ignore this technique depending on what you are mapping. I often see places like this however where (to me) it seems obvious that the mapper tried emulating mapping like described.

Also it depends on your very own motivation and idea about OSM. If you mapping for a virtual image of the world, then this might not be accurate enough for your taste. But if you are mapping to create a nice map, then I say this is sufficient in most cases.

I am just another user, this is be no means officially good. ;)

PS: Node unglue is amazing, thanks!

If I understood you: I would delete the part of the part you want to connect to the existing way and then "re-node" from there. To automate something like this you would need the exact same number of nodes for both way segments I guess.

If you want to copy some part of a way you could split it first, the select and copy the segment to the new way and combine the old again. But I think that was not what you asked.

Yes, the JOSM validator always nags but I am very sure this is a good mapping technique. I am not sure who recommended it to me at first, probably it was deelkar.

No idea about merkaartor, sorry.

That looks like a rogue coastline or something. It will probably have been caught by someone already and fixed.

"Due to copyright reasons this video program is available for download by people located in Australia only. If you are not located in Australia, you are not authorised to view this video."

:(

eeeerm, I wanted to answer in English.

wget -N does that too, you won't be able to use it together with -O though.

wget -N macht das von selbst, spielt allerdings nicht mit -O zusammen. ;)

I love removing unnecessary nodes from the TIGER data. Straight streets with 15 nodes and such. It gives me the feeling of making OSM faster, huzzah! (Yes, more of a placebo, but feel-good is always nice.)

Du darfst externe Quellen für jegliche Eintragungen in OSM nur benutzen, wenn du die Erlaubnis von ihnen hast! Vielleicht ist dir das sowieso schon klar, ich wollte es bloß lieber erwähnen. ;)

Super! Dann sind wir ja bald endlich mit Hamburg fertig. :)

Die ~20 Meter sind wohl in ganz Hamburg so, jedenfalls war im Westen anfangs auch alles verschoben.

The "problem" with Potlatch is that is (apparently) so easy to use. That is a bad thing as people can much easier screw up, BUT the benefit of it surely weighs in for that. The "fix" would probably be better guides and help for newbies generally.

...date is now calibrated...
...beep...
...proceed initialisation sequence...
...0.3548 launching gps...
...0.8736 launching tracker...
...1.0001 all systems online...
===OpenStreetMapping started successfully===

;)

Oh, das kannte ich garnicht. Danke!
Dann stoppe ich mein Script mal. :)