I was boring my cousin with talk of OpenStreetMap as I went to visit her in Plymouth again last weekend. It does kind of come up in conversation when you're sat in the passenger seat taking hundreds of uninteresting photos out of the car window.

I wasn't actually planning to go into the city itself. We ended up spending some time walking around "the Hoe" (grassy peninsula parkland place with views out to sea) and "the Barbican" old town around the harbour. These are pretty much the main tourist areas to visit in Plymouth (here), so while I there, I was thinking there was a good chance that this was all on the map already.

But it turns out not. I took a look last night, and saw the whole area in nice clear Yahoo imagery coverage, but very little mapping progress. I couldn't resist settling down for a hour or so of sketching in parks and road layouts. It seems like time well spent, because now we at least have more of the tourist areas of this city roughly in place, ready for somebody local or a visiting tourist to go survey properly.

I haven't done yahoo sketching for a while. The tag https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=road got voted in, which seems to have some baring on how we are supposed to go about doing it, but to my mind it's a clumsy solution, since it involves adding this tag everywhere, and then removing and replacing again later. Too many key presses. Sketching should be quick. But at least this, along with things like the OSM fieldwork have pointed a spotlight on the potential of yahoo sketching.

But I think if it was made more clear that we are allowed/encouraged to do yahoo sketching, then we wouldn't have any yahoo covered cities which are still missing their major tourist centres.