Hm. Works fine for me with OS X Firefox 3, but with Flash 9. I've heard some suggestions that there's a Caps Lock sensing bug in Flash 10 (there's certainly a ticket on the Adobe site for that, though with XP rather than OS X) - maybe it's this?

Dave - give me a couple of days and you never know what you might see. :)

dmuecke: "in all aspects" - that's a bit sweeping, isn't it? I wouldn't agree (obviously).

Works fine for me. What browser, OS and Flash Player version are you using?

It's just a PR gimmick (cynic, moi?) aimed at getting some pretty views in there - "honeypots" as they're called in the tourist trade.

The story says that they'll be using it for "castles, coastal paths, natural wonders, historic buildings [or] monuments and stadiums". Coastal paths are a non-starter - I'd like to see the Google trike on the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. No, really, I would. I wouldn't want to be the one who called the Coastguard after it fell off the cliff edge though.

The rest (except for "natural wonders", which could mean anything) are all private property. So access for trikes is entirely at the say-so of the landowner - who will be no doubt delighted with the publicity!

Yikes. Fair play to the author of that page for his ingenuity, but that's a really complicated way of doing it. The 'official' way is much easier!

Potlatch itself will read any GPX containing waypoints. The OSM website, however, will reject a GPX if it doesn't contain at least one trackpoint.

So just make sure your waypoints are in the same GPX as your tracklog. Alternatively, copy-and-paste a tiny trackpoint into your waypoint GPX file.

You can then click 'Edit' by the track name, and the waypoints will show up in Potlatch.

You can use waypoints quite easily in Potlatch - just click 'Edit' next to the track in your 'GPS Traces' listing.

xylome/xybot - well, touché!

But the point is that discussions about Potlatch are carried out in public, on the mailing lists. The code is open source and everyone can see what it does. There is a trac component for it and if you don't like something, you are invited to make a suggestion or submit a patch. And as the summary Potlatch changelog shows, the code is regularly revised to take account of this.

None of this appears to apply to xybot. It turns up, makes some changes, disappears again. There is some information on the wiki, but it is clearly inaccurate - e.g. "was used once (2008-10-10) on the european data" when it is seemingly being applied to European data with great frequency now. I genuinely don't know whether the tag lists on the wiki, which also haven't been updated since October 2008, are accurate or not.

Now it appears (not least from FK270673's comments) that you have the buy-in of the German community, and that's really good; that gives you the right to work on the data in Germany.

But you do not have the buy-in of the UK community, at least not yet, yet you are extensively changing UK data - including even some UK-specific tags (particularly Church of England, Church of Scotland etc.). That is unacceptable - particularly as you don't necessarily seem to appreciate the context of the tags, changing, for example, "High Church of Scotland" to "Church of Scotland". You would be drummed out of town in the Hebrides for doing that! And there are several more.

As several people have said, you need to ask before making changes, not after.

Bear in mind too that the wiki does not give rules. It gives guidelines. Nothing more. Just because it isn't documented on the wiki, doesn't make it wrong (and conversely, just because it's documented, doesn't make it any good - smoothness=very_horrible anyone?).

On a separate issue: duplicate ways are not solely the "fault" of Potlatch, in so far as one can attribute anything that easily: they're usually a direct result of the server running slow. Now this is clearly an issue so API 0.6 introduced version numbering to cope with instances like that and, as best as I can tell, problems have been significantly reduced. There are still some issues but it's getting a lot better.

Well, exactly. It might be. There are lots of subtleties like that - after all, it's worth recording that it's Anglican, yes; it's also worth recording that it's CoE rather than (say) Church in Wales, or the Episcopalian church. I could happily sit here and discuss these with you, or someone, all day.

Unfortunately xybot has decided that it knows best and is going to stamp over others' tags entirely without any of this discussion. Completely unacceptable.

There is - happily - a connection. It's the main route from the canal system to the Great Ouse.

From the Middle Level (Well Creek), you pass through Salter's Lode Lock onto the tidal Great Ouse. You turn right here, almost certainly ignoring the Old Bedford River (because the connection through Horseway and Welches Dam locks isn't currently navigable) and the New Bedford River (because it's very boring), and continue to Denver Sluice.

Here you can lock into the non-tidal Ely Ouse; and here, too, you can take the new lock onto the Relief Channel towards Kings Lynn.

Very evocative pic - reminds me of the Pembrokeshire bit perfectly.

Yep, signage through Bristol is utterly terrible. We lost it entirely and ended up somewhere in Avonmouth trying to find NCN41. Ironically the place we first lost the route was directly outside the NCN Centre by Bristol Cathedral!

Really impressed to see this - and glad you enjoyed the Pembrokeshire bit as much as we did!

And though I'm relieved we weren't the only people to get lost in Carmarthen and Newport, it's one of the great things about OSM - mapping it does make life easier for others cycling the route. The little NCN map on my eTrex gets more useful by the week, and it looks like this week, and the last, are going to be vintage weeks for improving NCN coverage.

When you say "running slowly", what's slow - loading, saving, moving around the map, or...?

Press L to show the lat and long at the current mouse position.

I'm not that suicidal. :) Seriously, we're doing ok for reports at the moment, but if we need some more than that'd be a good idea.

Er, the OSP analysis is based on the fact that Wikimedia actually tells you to derive from Google Maps. That's pretty unambiguous.

Harry and Dave are right. If you want to prove what you think is legal about copyright, then fine. But do it somewhere else, not with OSM. OSM's policy is, and always has been, that we don't take the risk. It's unfair, to put it mildly, to put others' work at risk just because you're personally convinced of something.

On the specifics:

The argument that "facts CANNOT be copyrighted" is a wild over-simplification and if I hear one more North American recite it parrot-fashion I will not be responsible for my actions. In some jurisdictions, collections of facts can be, and are. That's what the EU database right is. Yes, it's a shit situation. We don't make the law but we have to live within it.

For Google Street View, my personal view is that it could be legal in some jurisdictions to take street names from it – but with two big provisos. The first is that Google's Ts&Cs don't prevent you (i.e. breach of contract), and they probably do. The second is that you certainly wouldn't be allowed to use it in conjunction with geocoded information; if you recognise the street from the photos, perhaps you could then take the street name, but not if you were using the geodata to identify which street it was that had this name. Even then, even despite both of those, I'm not entirely convinced any of this would be legal in a sweat-of-the-brow jurisdiction like the UK.

What sort of thing would you like Potlatch to do better?

The sort of mapping I do doesn't generally involve lots of tags - quite the opposite! - so I'm interested to find out how Potlatch could better help those who need them.

There's currently a bug in Potlatch which means it won't delete a way which contains the same node twice (e.g. a circular way). It'll be fixed in the next day or two, but before then, just remove the second occurrence of the node (select the node and press '-') and save it, then try to delete the way again.

Paul Johnson - aggrieved JOSM users on IRC say otherwise ;)

I believe there was a court case in Singapore fairly recently where this technique (though wrt maps, not imagery) was judged a copyright infringement.