@Wynndale yeah I see what you mean. Actually I pondered that problem when mapping around the BT tower before. One to discuss in the pub I guess
@Edgemaster Shame you can't make it. Next time then!

Yeah. I noticed your area looking nicely sketched out. Looks like you've gone for lots more detail than me. Must've taken a while!

I'll explain my thinking a little more.

Buildings outlines would ideally be mapped either not at all, or completely and whole-heartedly (like in Helsinki). The only decent middle-ground would be based on some sort of importantness metric. That approach works well for many maps, but maybe it's too subjective to work well in OSM.

In London we've just ended up with a disorganised hotch-potch of building outlines. It's easy to see how this happened. It's a massive city. Sketching building outlines is tedious. Surely it could never be done across the whole city, and so nobody attempts it. Instead though we have a handful of important buildings sketched in, plus a handful of buildings which happen to have interesting outlines. Then in outlying areas we have funny little clutches of building outlines for concrete housing estates. This is because they're really difficult to map in any satisfyingly complete way without showing the buildings. These are the worst offenders though, because they are not important buildings by any stretch of the imagination. Then more recently we've had the likes of Dave & Blumpsy battling for completeness supremacy with really beautifully complete building outline mapping along with housenumbering in their areas.

Nobody's intentionally damaging the map, but when you zoom out and look at it, we've collaboratively created a rather ugly imbalance. The London mapping party gang are in a good position to experiment, discuss and figure out a way forward.

@Tom Chance - Yeah building colour does feel a bit overpowering. Mainly when zoomed in like this. The roads are dawn over the top of buildings which has the effect of hiding the colour a lot when zoomed out.

@TimSC - I quite like the idea of getting the retail strips in as pink landuse=retail areas. Been doing a bit of that. In central London in gets a bit fiddly trying to decide when an area is no longer retail. Plus what landuse is an area like soho full of restaurants & bars?

@Nah. The rest of the world will just have to organise their own mapping parties :-)

Congratulations Neil. Great work! I see you've updated the wiki page too (We have a whole list of other UK paths to map if anyone fancies it!)

Yeah. This one was marginally easier than other quizzes I've been to. I think I knew about 5 or 6 answers out of the 30... But I think I knew about one answer which Stephen & Welshie hadn't already written down. Useless.

Yes it's good to have nice illustrative photos on tag documentation wiki pages. I think it helps a lot even in cases where the meanings should be obvious. I've been doing a bit of this using photos from my own collection/mapping (as in this case) I've also occasionally gone on a little wikimedia commons hunt for nice pictures e.g. backery and garden centre. Lots more work to do on this, and on sorting out tag docs in general. Speaking of which...

@flohoff... landuse=meadow or natural=meadow? It's not as clear as it should be

@randomjunk Yes back in 2006, given that you single-handedly mapped the the area of Thursday's entire cake during that old mapping party, I suppose we can forgive you for not mapping the post boxes :-)

I suppose in theory there's not so much point saying exactly what you're changing in your changeset comments, since that information is kind of in the changeset itself. Better to give the "why" rather than the "what"

Hi Randy. A real Chattanoogan! Excellent. So if you're ever driving on that particular bit of motorway you might want to check the oneway directions I've put on there. Think I've got them right, but it gets a bit confusing in the middle of the junction there. So we need to work on turning Chattanooga green. D'you have a green patch over on the East side of Chattanooga there?

Chattanooga Choo Choo hey? I've been trying to focus on motorways (freeways/iterstates/whater you call them), but I did get side-tracked by a few Chattanooga choo choo railways (also very messed up in the TIGER data)

Matt actually asked me to add a feature to my U.S. cities map to play a tune when you click on them. Seems like there's well known tunes about most of them. e.g. "Show me the way to Amarillo"... (This time last week there was only one way to Amarillo, but now it's connected to 128 cities. Hurrah!)

Good work Ian. You're helping to build a truly free map, whilst those suckers over at MapMaker are giving their data to google.

Presumably the police force already use maps a lot, unless this is the first time anyone's created a decent street map of the city. UK police use maps in their control-centres to track units in realtime for effective emergency response. They have navigation systems in the police cars. In resource planning offices they look over maps to figure out crime hotspots etc. In the UK the police use highly details Ordnance Survey maps for all of these tasks but they are looking at alternatives for publishing maps online. They are starting to publish crime statistics maps, and for publishing purposes it is expensive to use Ordnance Survey maps.

Gah! Guess we'll never know what that prawn dish was.

Skateboard mapping? Radical!

Speeding round Wembley Stadium was the most fun I've had while roller mapping.

We should shouldn't we? We have some information on Website Internationalization now. Just a matter of finding somebody to translate some of the text really.

I'm also quite keen on getting people to translate the 'About' page on the wiki into various languages.

You mean with an underscore: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=bus_stop

Currently the NoNames layer (along with all other CloudMade styles) is getting updated based on weekly planet dumps. The current intended schedule is to get this weekly data (snapshop from a Thursday morning) into the Cloudmade systems by the end of the day on Friday each week, but complications can mean this doesn't happen until the following week. Hence the NoNames map right now is most using a snapshot from Thursday 4th, but hopefully (possibly maybe) some time today it will start showing the snapshot from yesterday.

At some point we hope to improve the turnaround time by switching to a diff based updating process.

hehe. I'm constantly having this trouble too. Every hour you spend gathering data means about an hour sat at the computer editing. It's best to try to get editing done soon after surveying though. This helps a lot with remembering the details and actually makes the process quicker (I spend less time scratching my head puzzling over my notes)

Excellent! OpenStreetMap is certainly in need of some more detail in this part of the UK. I chipped away at Northampton a couple of times when visiting, but it's still scoring big on the UK Mapping Priorities. You're right, Wellingborough has even less detail. We should probably sketch in some landuse=residential grey blobs based on landsat, to help visualise progress, but ultimately we'll need people like you to get there on the ground and survey these places.

Ah yes. He was telling us about Caterham mapping.

"language setting switches to English"?

I just tested it. I have my language (for the website) set to German... I posted a diary entry with language (in the diary entry drop-down) set to English... and the website stayed on German as expected. The language selection when posting a diary entry has no baring on the general website display language.

Well there is such a list on the Key:shop page. In addition there's more details to drill down into for particular shop types. Why? Well because somebody started creating such pages, I think it's worthwhile for the reasons I've mentioned. It's worth clarify what exactly is meant by a 'florist' even if it seems obvious... and actually when you start to think about it, there are edge cases in everything. When is a florist actually a garden centre?

The same argument could apply to religion and denomination. Personally I dont know enough about religions to comment really, but I do know that when mapping I've never had a problem with edge cases on these tags, so maybe that's why nobody's got interested in filling in red links on that page.