Go Map!!

@jesolem “As far as I can see there is no license granted for metadata on OSV either and with no API for the metadata, how are you going to get it?” Well, we shall see! Martijn’s comments here and elsewhere lead me to think that the intention is to offer it openly, and with the project less than a month old I’m not going to call them out for not having implemented everything yet. If there’s no progress six months down the line then yes, of course, I’d be less inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

@jesolem:

The API is open, the images have an open license, we give all images and data to OSM.

But the metadata is not open. Yes, you can download photos of a random motorway somewhere; but without knowing where it is (i.e. the location metadata) then it’s fairly useless.

You do permit this information to be used in OSM, which is terrific - just as Bing and Mapbox do with their aerial imagery. But until the metadata is available openly, Mapillary isn’t open like OpenStreetMap is - it’s more like Google Map Maker, where contributors send their work to a third party, but only that third party can use the results. That’s why OpenStreetView is exciting as a truly open solution.

@jml: dude, seven years of knocking Potlatch and you still haven’t learned to spell it correctly ;)

Why is it impossible to report spam in these diaries? A simple ‘report me’ link would do it.

Because no-one’s yet coded the feature, and as alluded to in the ticket linked by CloCkWeRX, it’s not quite as simple as you might think. Patches very welcome!

*c’mon

*too

Ah, the curse of unreviewed TIGER. I wrote a bit about the challenges of fixing it last year: @Richard/diary/34290

at this moment OSM is a map for mappers, not for users

openstreetmap.org is a map for mappers, not for users, and intentionally so. But OSM is a lot more than openstreetmap.org.

why can’t openstreetmap.org be a bit more user friendly?

Because you haven’t made it so. There are no magic fairies who will swoop in and make everything awesome. Learn to write stylesheets, or to code, and send some patches!

I don’t really have any skin in this game as I use iD infrequently and JOSM basically never, but what’s your “squaring buildings” issue in iD? Select any building in iD and there’s a “Square the corners of this area” option right there, with a key binding described.

You might want to call an antivirus hotline, it looks like you have some malware which is affecting your comment posting ability.

“Not safe at all”? Don’t be daft.

Are you at risk on a bike? Of course you are. The risk varies from place to place, from road to road. But extrapolating the bad shit that happens - and I wouldn’t deny it does - to the one-in-six lethal odds of Russian Roulette is utterly disproportionate.

Yes, things need to get better. But try driving across London instead and watch what that does to your blood pressure and general life expectancy. The bike is still the best choice for sub-5 mile journeys, most places, most of the time - especially if you’re canny about your route choices, which is where OSM comes in.

And if you’ll now excuse me I have an awesome cargo bike project to build up.

This looks really good. I like Mike’s mention (in your other diary entry comments) that “I populated my reference data (from latest county GIS) with a surface attribute, as well as an updated review against current imagery to identify roads that have deteriorated into tracks”. If we could use this to add surface=unpaved to unpaved rural TIGER roads, then hallelujah.

I wasn’t aware of the fact that the collected user diaries were introduced after the user diary.

They weren’t. I coded the ‘all diary entries’ view on May 4 2007, one day before the Rails port went live for the first time.

https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/commit/8758685a86c3032a412183a53399e3e77dae75a1

Since I started following about 2 years ago, I never considered the user diaries to be personal diaries, but to contain topics interesting for a wider audience

The user diaries were intended for mappers to write about their mapping activities.

@Amaroussi: would you like to provide a citation for your blanket statement? iD’s turn restriction editor is excellent IMO.

That’s very cool. Did you parse the full Wikipedia dump yourself or is there a dump of just coordinates and article IDs/titles?

A handful of things, all in my obviously highly biased opinion:

• P2 is very efficient to work with when you know the shortcuts
• the P2 UI is well suited for fast browsing and fixing across a modestly wide area or along a linear route (e.g. via Tasks palette)
• P2 has very good support for working with vector data - GPXs (as SomeoneElse describes), shapefiles and others, and combines “doing the right thing” with some powerful transformation possibilities
• Floating imagery window lets you work with two imagery sources (or one imagery source and one topo map, or whatever) at once

Broadly speaking, for me P2 offers all the power I need but without a complex interface. When you say “I don’t see much advantage to it compared with the other two”, I’d say the same but the other way round - I don’t see much, or indeed any, advantage to JOSM compared with the lighter and simpler P2. That’s for my type of editing, of course, which is principally roads/cycleways/etc. rather than buildings, and principally rural rather than cities; and I’m sure that many people have editing requirements that P2 doesn’t fulfil. P2 is really bad at fast worldwide tagfiddling, for example - JOSM is the unchallenged champion there. ;)

Oh, that sort of “power mapper”…

The changeset error has been fixed - an upgrade to the server software unexpectedly affected Potlatch. Sorry for the hassle.

Vincent: why not?

That’s definitely good news. Previous route was quite the hilly trek…

There’s two variables which need to be taken into account. One, obviously, is the background of the learner: if you’re a GIS professional you’ll feel right at home with JOSM, whereas if you’re a human being (ok, I jest, but a less experienced user) you’ll probably take to iD better.

But the other is the background of the instructor. A lot of experienced OSMers have lots of practice in JOSM and very little in any other editor. This results (and I’ve seen it) in the instructor trying to use the online editor as they would JOSM, then getting frustrated when it doesn’t work the same. On average, a JOSM-native instructor is less likely to give good tuition in iD than in JOSM.