It was pretty early into my OSM mapping “career” that I heard about Maproulette. At the time I was too hyper-focused on getting my hometown of Springfield, Illinois squared away to worry about the rest of the map, and I assumed most of the challenges would be beyond my skill level at the time anyway. But yesterday as I was reading through weeklyOSM 525 I was led to the latest Maproulette updates. Having only a vague awareness of it, nothing in the list of new features necessarily excited me, but it reminded me of how unsure of myself I was 4 years ago and how much I’d learned since then. So I decided to give it a shot.

The challenge I’ve really taken to is Duplicate Roads Across North America, which is comprised of a surprising variety of tasks. Many are simply instances of duplicate geometry being imported en masse from TIGER or the like - very easy to disentangle and correct. On the opposite end of the difficulty scale are ways that are parts of complex relations like multiple bus routes, and I immediately “nope” the hell out of those when I see them, lest I screw things up royally.

It’s also interesting to see the mistakes of previous users. Sometimes it’s a simple mis-click just too far from an intersection node. Other times it comes down to sheer laziness, like the many, many instances of users creating multiple parking aisles by using a single way to snake up and down the parking lot, drawing over existing ways on the perimeter. Usually the easiest way to deal with those is to “nuke the snake” and redraw each individual parking aisle, and more often than not you’re adding in one-way directionality that the original editor never included, so you feel like you’re not just fixing something, but adding something.

And that’s another thing I really enjoy about Maproulette: dropping into a random area, solving a problem, and throwing in some bonus upgrades while you’re at it. Tidy up the connecting road geometry, maybe add some obvious turn restrictions to a nearby intersection. So many times I’ve been plopped into an area that was in dire need of some TLC and could not leave until I’d set at least a small portion of it on the right path. I like to imagine that some random local user, perhaps years from now, will stumble upon that area be like, “Whoa… nice. I should start doing that.”

Also it’s just fun to get out of your own little “zone” and see what the map looks like elsewhere. You’ll find desolate, probably-never-been-edited-by-a-human areas as well as insanely detailed chunks with tags you’ve never heard of. Every task is its own little adventure.