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Blimey, someone clearly needs more coffee. Or less coffee. Or something.

If you reread my answer, I actually said “have a look at help.openstreetmap.org”, which is the interactive help system where you’d have found the answer to your question.

I’m really not quite sure what you mean by “OpenStreetMap is a zillion years behind countries like Germany”. OpenStreetMap in Germany is great. OpenStreetMap in Britain is pretty good too. Both countries still have lots to do.

As for the editor - there’s a new one coming on-stream real soon now which is aimed to be easier for the novice.

I’m an unpaid volunteer like you. In my previous reply I was trying to point you to the place where you’ll find the answer to the question, and give you a quick summary to explain. But if the response is 300 words of yelling I guess I’ll leave answering your second question to someone else.

Have a look at http://help.openstreetmap.org/ where you’ll find this answer has been asked (and answered) a zillion times. Roughly: zoom levels update at different times, your browser might have the old tiles cached, and not everything is rendered on the default map anyway.

Re: Brick Lane, the Oxford High Street Rule applies.

That’s crazily good - very impressed.

Depends who you mean by “new map users”! There are many different groups of users.

switch2osm.org’s clear focus is “people using osm.org on third-party websites”. learnosm.org has a focus on “show the newbie what to do”, although it’s a bit compromised right now by having been written for HOT use at first… but that can be fixed. I’m sure both would welcome clued-up new contributions… or is there another target group you’re thinking of?

Certainly technically possible. Politically very difficult. There are lots of people who say “this is a map project, it should have a map on the front page like Google does”. I can see both points of view: openstreetmap.de explains everything, sure, but there is way too much text and most people’s instinctive, if not conscious, reaction would be ‘tl;dr’. It’s not that “a big enough group” doesn’t understand that it’s important; it’s just that their view of how to tackle it differs from yours. :)

But it should be possible to better communicate what OSM is about, while still presenting a usable map, without resorting to such an extreme. The trick is to build that - such that 90% of people say “wow, that’s great, that’s what we wanted all along if only we knew it!”. OSM has always thrived on the work of talented, driven people.

With documentation - basically, don’t get involved in the wiki. It’s a complete timesink and beyond reform; think of it as a community scratchpad rather than newbie-friendly documentation. Better to help with LearnOSM and/or WWG. By the same token, I built switch2osm.org rather than working on the developer docs on the wiki, and the impact has been far greater.

I don’t think anyone is, or has, argued against being welcoming to ordinary people. Where OSM has problems in this area, it’s not for a lack of desire; it’s just that we simply don’t have enough volunteers to actually do the work, and the fact some of our community seem to delight in pouring scorn on our existing volunteers hardly encourages new ones.

Saying “the front page should be better” is easy. Actually doing the work to make it unambiguously better is hard.

You highlight OSB, and that’s great. Getting that functionality on the OSM front page would be a vast challenge of design and of resources, and that’s why it hasn’t happened overnight. As it happens some work is underway on a solution that provides some of this functionality (see http://overpass.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/), and it would be great to extend it in an OSB direction - perhaps by making the unloved data overlay more user-friendly.

But if you can’t code, and can’t design, yet still want to help: the new Welcome Working Group desperately needs support and commitment. And OSM’s documentation always needs improving (well, strictly speaking, it needs taking outside, shooting, and then starting from scratch). Drop a line to Martijn van Exel if you want to get involved with WWG.

There’s no “correctly” in this case. Route relations do not have to be ordered. You can do it if you like, but it doesn’t achieve anything (any smart client will order the relations if it needs to) and you can’t expect newbies to keep them ordered.

SOTM-US 2014!

Best place to ask questions is probably the #osm-dev IRC channel - lots of developers hang out there.

Thanks! :) And richlv’s right - we love all our OSM contributors, that’s why we want their contributions to stay in the database when the big guys bare their teeth at us.

This has been hashed out a zillion times on the mailing lists and the consensus of the majority of the OpenStreetMap community is that we do not run the risk of copying from Google Street View.

There are plenty of reasons for this. Firstly, in Europe, where the OpenStreetMap servers are hosted, it is conceivable that Google’s Street View imagery is protected by database rights. Secondly, Google’s Terms of Service now expressly say that “you must not… use the Products to create a database of places or other local listings information”, and OpenStreetMap is clearly a database of places. And so on.

Whether or not you think differently “as far as [you’re] concerned” isn’t the issue. OSM is not a place to test out legal theories. We have always played safe with legal interpretations: it simply isn’t worth putting the world’s best free geodatabase at risk. Please don’t be the black sheep in the community.

“not until yesterday, when a classmate reminded me of the existence of such feature, did I remember I could use it as a crutch to my mapping”

um, you can’t. Like it says on the “Copyright & License” page to the left, “OSM contributors are reminded never to add data from any copyrighted sources (e.g. Google Maps or printed maps) without explicit permission from the copyright holders”. Google haven’t given us such permission.

Seconded - nice work!

Coincidentally I’ve just (yesterday) come back from a nine-day cycling holiday in Jordan. Took my GPS everywhere i went. Uploaded the tracks to OSM this evening and… Every. Single. Road. was already mapped.

That’s terrific news. When we cycled Coast & Castles last spring, the Blyth section was the blemish on an otherwise very enjoyable route.

You can check out the code at https://github.com/systemed/iD .

The data is from the api06 test server.

Do pop in at the #osm-dev IRC channel on OFTC any time if you’d like to ask any questions about it!

Excellent. Really looking forward to this. Is the source anywhere?