Thanks - it’s always useful to get some actual numbers and examples to look at rather than the “truthiness”-based opinions that have been expressed so far.

It’s a known problem unfortunately - some of the problem on this help question might be useful:

https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/50567/wiki-accountpage-creation-error

My experience of logging bugs against JOSM (core) has that they tend to get dealt with pretty quickly, actually. Certainly faster than certain other maintainers… However, with plugins they’re at the mercy of whoever wrote the plugin in the first place, so you can’t really blame the JOSM devs here.

From memory, haven’t other people had a go at “terracer” alternatives in the past? Might be worth asking on the help site or #osm to see what recommendations people have.

In these cases was there any reason why you didn’t mention the problem to the users concerned? Most or all look like “cockup rather than conspiracy” - just genuine user mistakes, or perhaps inexperience (either in general or with a new editor - such as the maps.me POI in the middle of the road).

Obviously it’s great that “highway=yes” gets set back to the previous highway value but isn’t there a risk that they’ll do it again if they don’t know of the mistake that you’ve corrected?

Best Regards, Andy

You’ve said “It seems like a huge majority of the issues need to be carefully revieved by hand and cleaned up” and I think that you’re absolutely right. As Mateusz Konieczny says above, even in “straightforward” cases you need to check that any resulting tagging makes any geographical sense, even if there’s only one topological interpretation.

I’d also suggest that where a problem is fixed that it’s explained to the person who added the erroneous data in the first place what the problem is - if they don’t know that there’s a problem they’ll keep doing it.

I’d also suggest that any “fixing” changeset comments explain the problem in terms that a mapper that might have created the problem in the first place, so don’t say things like “remove self intersection of area outline” or similar.

“a new evil”?

The news headlines from around the world over the last couple of weeks have been pretty miserable for lots of reasons, but apparently the thing that really matters is some people mislabelling “tourist attractions” on an online map.

There’s also information over at osm.wiki/Import and osm.wiki/Import/Guidelines .

Pretty much any non-contradictory combination of tags is “valid”. If that’s the best way of describing a real-world object, then that’s what I’d use.

I think they’re breeding - the same ones exist at least as far north as Sutton.

As far as rendering highway=crossing nodes, it would be a relatively simple change to the “standard” style (I made the same change to a version of that style here. There’s probably a github issue or three already logged for it.

Years ago, there used to be a map style on OpenStreetMap.org called “osmarender” which tried to show almost every feature (but in the process didn’t look very pretty). It went away for various technical / support reasons, and there hasn’t been a replacement for it. Part of the reason for that is that query mechanisms have improved markedly - things like the “?” icon at the right of the main site that allow you to click and see what’s there and display details such as node/3964948498 even though it’s not rendered in the “standard” map style at all.

http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/ might also be useful - type “office” into the box at the top right of that and click through to “Overpass Turbo” zoom in and run the query - you will get a screen like http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/gOJ showing you all of the offices nearby.

With regard to actual map tiles, I do try and render lots of the office/man_made infrastructure in a style that I maintain for my own use (no public tiles alas) - see http://i.imgur.com/NCkW98m.png for an example. Sirens, Pipelines and Flagpoles I’ve never thought of doing though - I’m sure that everyone has a list of things that “should be rendered on a standard map style but aren’t”. the problem is that everyone’s list is different.

Most “international boundaries” discussions take place over at http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=53173 - a trawl through the history there might find some prior discussion.

Currently in OSM it’s not a “country”, though it has been recently:

http://osm.mapki.com/history/relation.php?id=4112727

As ever with discussing actual changes, comments on the discussion on changesets that changed the state are the best way to try and understand what’s happening, such as happened with changeset/37389042 .

@marczoutendijk It would indeed be great if there was a way to easily define your own map layers at osm.org, rather than using the 5 canned ones (but as Richard says above just wishing won’t make it so; you actually need to sit down and write some code to do it).

There are a couple of cludgy ways to do that sort of thing currently - see osm.wiki/User:SomeoneElse/Your_tiles_from_osm.org for an example. Essentially if you can figure out a way of converting something like http://a.tile.openstreetmap.org/7/58/53.png into http://korona.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/tiles/roads/x=58&y=53&z=7 you should be able to replace one set of tiles with another (terms of use etc. notwithstanding).

I think your “pipeline” isn’t quite complete…

What happens next is that on-the-ground mappers familiar with an area spot a remote edit, and go and check it. Sometimes the correction is valid, but often the “error” being corrected wasn’t actually an error at all - perhaps it was a bit of an edge case, like way/53054452/history , where any OSM tagging would be a bit of a compromise.

In areas where there is a reasonable concentration of mappers, and it’s really not clear how things really are, it’s better to try and ask people to check the real situation rather than guessing, and the best way to do that is either a changeset discussion comment on a previous editing changeset or an OSM note.

It’s important to remember that OSM isn’t just data - it’s a representation of things in the real world, and the real world is sometimes shades of grey rather than black and white.

@BushmanK Interesting - I’ve often added details conveying that sort of information as part of a note (see e.g. way/343924077 ) - maybe “wood:age” et al is worth looking at.

As well as “detecting problems” we also need to ask why a problematic edit was made.

For example, “doodle the dog” in the example above - was that drawn by a bored college student who’d been dragged into a HOT mapping session against their will? If so, perhaps we could try and engage with the person running the class?

We’re seeing a definite spike in new editors near me in the UK, compared to (say) 6 days ago:

http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosm?c=United%20Kingdom#8/52.955/-0.654

What’s really interesting is that there’s actually roughly twice as many new mappers using iD as last week, not even counting the new MAPS.ME ones! It’d be interesting to see how widespread that is.

On countries that don’t use junction reference numbers as much as some others (like the US), I wouldn’t expect too much from a query looking for junction reference numbers; just the same as in the UK (where there aren’t multiplexed routes) I wouldn’t expect to be able to extract sensible and complete route relations.

Just because the wiki says to do something it doesn’t mean it’s commonly done or even a good idea; sometimes it represents only the view of the person who last updated that wiki page.

In the US I’d spend time on misaligned and mismapped TIGER data before even thinking about whether a nonexistant junction reference number is indicated by “noref=yes” :)

It’s only “too complicated” for a new user if they aren’t guided through the process when they choose to add a диспансер. New users don’t read the wiki and don’t read the email lists or the forum (initially they probably don’t know that any of these exist). What new users do see on sign is:

The CTs, which the have to agree to. A confirmation email, which they need to click on a link on. “osm.org/welcome”, which has a big “Start Mapping” button on it which they’ll probably click on*. An osm.org screen centred at their browser location If they click “Edit” they’re offered the choice of the “iD Walkthrough” or to start editing immediately.

iD (at least in my English locale) doesn’t know what a “диспансер” is and if they search for it and there are no local matches the first worldwide match is a hospital in Serbia. Compare that with adding a feature that iD does know about.

• The “welcome” does have a link to osm.org/help , which does link to external resources such as the wiki, but it’s some way down in the list of things presented to newcomers, and not really understandable by them when they get there.

To summarise, if you want people (especially new users) to add these tags, you’ll need to make it easy for people to add them. Simply writing them down somewhere that new users won’t read doesn’t do that.

As an aside, you might like to know that “healthcare” is the current quarterly project in GB. See this post on the GB list https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2016-March/018720.html .

Actually, I think the left/right thing could probably be handled by “line-offset”, as on the example here:

http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/128244/tilemill-inset-line-with-negative-line-offset-property-value-produces-strange-a

However I don’t think I’ll worry about left vs right sidewalks (or at least not yet). I’d want to remove some of the duplication I’ve introduced into roads.mss first.

The “other” problem (where an unclassified road joined a tertiary it “poked through” and could be seen over the casing at the other side of the road was fixed by setting “line-cap: butt” instead of “round”.

You’re absolutely right - the highway tags in OSM do have a Western bias (strictly speaking, a Western European bias, since that was where the tags originated - there are parts of the US where they don’t work well, either).

However, as Sanderd17 mentioned above, there’s nothing to stop people from adding more detail - things like surface, tracktype, etc.

It’s also possible, when you’re creating maps for your Nuvi, to process different sorts of data in different ways. For example, when I create maps for mine I have it ignore roads and tracks that are probably private. There are a few questions over at https://help.openstreetmap.org/ that might help with that. Although it’s more complicated than just downloading a map from someone else, it’s not that difficult.

If you get stuck with anything, just ask - there’s a list of ways to get in touch on osm.wiki/Contact_channels that should help.