Wikipedia is like OpenStreetMap but without the wikifiddlers.

Oh, wait.

I'M IN UR VILLAGE EDITIN UR PUB

This is OSM. You're meant to fix the missing areas. We look forward to your edits. :)

It was spam last time and it's still spam.

I think we only ever applied "be bold" to the wiki, not to the map itself. :)

In OSM, "be bold" should always be tempered by "respect others' work". OSM's greatest success is that we have a community who produce wonderful things. Stomping over their work, especially by automated edits, will generally annoy them, with the result that they leave and we consequently get a worse map into the future.

For 90% of the world, 95% of the time, bots are unjustified. In the States, there is an argument to say that bots can be run to correct the mistakes of the original TIGER import. Frederik Ramm, for example, ran a bot to remove node tags from TIGER data, which vastly reduced the size of the data with no ill effects whatsoever.

In other words, if (in retrospect) we think the original TIGER import script did something wrong, there's no harm in fixing that by a bot. But this is a very rare exception.

Someone beat you to it by five years. :)

Hm - I went to look and noticed some fixup needed a bit further down the A40. Curse you OSM, too addictive as ever.

I mean "agree with", of course ;)

"if (currently) just for a minority of people who've been following "the boring legal issues" and actually care about the freedom of OSM data"

That's a really rotten thing to say. What you mean is:

"if (currently) just for a minority of people who've been following "the boring legal issues" and disagree with my personal opinion about the freedom of OSM data"

I don't mind if you disagree with me or others, but I do mind if you say I don't care about it.

Dear Mr Fairfoul,

Please don't spam our website. Thank you.

emj - yes, maps are free for anyone who wants them; we do that by providing the data. You can't make a map without data of any sort.

The aim of OSM is clearly expressed - on the wiki front page, the OSM Foundation site, and elsewhere - as creating and providing free geographic data.

ctheile: No, the product is not "totally in the possession of the company". You have to share the data. That is better for OSM, because it means OSM gets data which wouldn't have been made available under CC-BY-SA.

You do not have to share other aspects of the product which are not relevant to OSM. It might disappoint you if you want more share-alike products to be created in general, but that's not the aim of OSM.

I don't think that's the case.

ODbL might in some ways make life harder for CloudMade. Under CC-BY-SA, CloudMade doesn't have to publish the raw data (the source) for any derivative databases it makes. Under ODbL, it does.

I'm neither a "Foundation person" nor particularly a friend of Steve Coast's and I'm strongly in support of the new licence.

There appears to be an issue with the Yahoo Flash API. (Yahoo supply us with aerial imagery.) We are looking into it.

> "My issues are with the process, not with the license."

I think that misses the point in an extraordinary fashion.

The process is driven by OSM users like you. There are no paid employees, no pressure groups. Just some volunteer mappers like Firefishy and Matt above who have, selflessly, given of their time to help resolve a situation that has dogged OSM since its very early days.

They are volunteers. Of course they don't do everything perfectly. But they are incredibly open and have been soliciting comments, and more volunteers, for years now. You could have helped at any time in the past few years. You could have stood for OSMF election (just as I did in 2007). If you don't like the process, you can join in and change it - rather than silently waiting until late in the day then suddenly saying "oh, I don't like this" and marching off.

We are working out what to do about spam at the upcoming hack weekend: osm.wiki/Hack_weekend_May_2010

efred, I'm sure that as English isn't your mother tongue you didn't mean to come across this way, but I'm afraid your initial message is astonishingly rude and unlikely to convince many people that they should help you.

Soooo... Potlatch links to tagstat and the data browser links to the wiki.

And the whole unholy OSM tagging mess continues on its eyeball-sandpapering course.

Didn't Whittlesey once have so many pubs they named them after letters of the alphabet? (Or is that a myth?)

giggls - no, really, Tom's right, they're not UK standards. In the UK we tag non-primary A roads as "highway=primary" ;)