I think the rule of thumb is that anything that is public (and relatively static) can be mapped. Secret things should not be mapped and private things should only be mapped if people with access to them choose to do so. The reason for this is quite practical, private and secret things aren’t verifiable and things on the map need to be.

That said, I think the existence of the military landuse in question is public knowledge and so it totally can and should be mapped.

For what it’s worth, the large number of gps points that strava has is great, but the consequence is that it does result in sharp details of a route getting smoothed out. It’s much better than a low quality gps trace, but I’m not sure how much better it is than a good gps trace + some local knowledge.

Some of these are deeply confused parts of OSM itself. The tag landuse=forest has completely failed at reaching any standardized meaning, and it’s as far as I know, its presence is mostly a consequence of a few imports and confusion by new editors.

Footpath and path are confusing, and that has history behind it as well, since footpath is an older tag, but path does a better job of describing a wider ranger of possibilities (path + foot=designated is the same as a footpath).

Nature preserves and parks are also a little confusing, and I think until recently the schema was in flux, not sure if it still is.

Interesting. My brother and I had toyed with the idea of something vaguely similar (but more complicated, basically an app to track where parking tickets were/weren’t being enforced).

Does it actually use the OSM data to find parking spots, or does it just look for where other people have parked in the passed and suggest those locations.

How do you (or do you) deal with GPS inaccuracies that are common in underground parking & areas with lots of skyscrappers?

I’m well-aware of caltopo, and it’s pretty useful in the US where its default basemap shows forests, and where you have access to the impressive USGS topographical maps. In British Columbia, OSM is just so much better than the alternative maps (with some exceptions every now and then) that I usually don’t bother.

The slope angle feature is nifty, though as far as I know it doesn’t show run-out zones.

Service roads in OSM and Forest Service Roads in North America are entirely different beasts, in my understanding. The confusing naming is unfortunate, and you can probably blame the Brits for it :P

iD has validation checks, they’re just relatively simple (like unmarked ways, and points without any tags). I think its validation features should be enhanced, but probably not too much (we really don’t want people to start faking data just to pass a validator).

In theory, it would be nice if everyone could JOSM, but it really sucks with high-DPI screens, and it’s only user-friendly if you already have a fairly solid understanding of how OSM works, which is a total no-go for most people who are not armchair mappers.

Has this been deployed to the servers yet? I’m still running into problems with intermittent stream rendering.

Regarding addresses, if a building has only one address (and the address is only for one building), I typically put the address on the building. However, if you choose not to, there’s nothing particularly wrong.

I was a little annoyed previously at all of keepright’s false positives, but actually, if I’m willing to sort through a few of them, there are a lot of really useful errors being caught.

@ff5722: theoretically a great idea, but how would you keep the spammers from just making a garbage changeset first.

This really depends on what you’re up to, but on things like back-country trails I often find it very helpful to know things like trail_visibility & sac_scale.

There are certainly a lot of ways that have superfluous tags as a consequence of import scripts though.

One place where this could be useful is in the US, where there are large “National Forest” parks that have the unfortunate landuse=forest tag on them, even though they’re only partly forests. Some editors want the landuse=forest to stay because they don’t want to see the green go away. This data, even if the quality is poor, might be better than the current state.

I think the man_made tag is a little unfortunate. There are a lot of man made things that don’t use it, and in actuality it’s just a dumping ground for things that people can’t make a better scheme for.

Certainly an animal made feature that is reasonably permanent and prominent deserves a place in OSM. One problem is that a lot of features that animals leave aren’t very permanent. The other problem is that surveys tend to take place in places that are regularly tracked by humans. Animals usually avoid humans, and so a lot of such discoveries are likely to be made in places that have either 1) recently scene human intrusion, and the animals are on their way out or 2) are in places where surveys would be very uncommon and the data will be out-of date really quickly.

As for tagging a riparian forest, just use natural=wood, and tag the respective waterway too. The fact that it’s beside a river/lake/etc is really all that it needs to be riparian.

If you have time to do a detailed survey, then in some cases, there are often small areas that could be tagged with wetland=wet_meadow, wetland=marsh, or wetland=swamp; however, a wetland isn’t just ground that regularly gets puddles on it, it should be land that is always (or almost always) waterlogged. Usually different kind of vegetation thrives in wetland that does on regular land.

What’s the difference between forestry & logging?

I looked into it using the Bing API directly and it looks like there actually is a 7 year approximation for the image capture date.

You can check out the supposed current date of that area using the Bing imagery analyzer for OSM by Martijn van Exel link to area. That indicates the current ones where taken between December 2009 and September 2016, I think. 7 years is a hell of an approximation, so I may be reading that wrong. Also, I don’t think it’s possible to find the date of the old imagery.

I also recall a diary entry a bit ago indicating that bing was apparently updating its imagery in some places, but it seems strange that it would update it with older imagery.

The “highway kinks” check that TO-FIX does would catch that, since Wood Lane is very kinked. Off course it won’t catch short accidental drags, bug I don’t think that’s practical to catch.

I found the area you where describing with the OSM History Viewer. That area does look a little like it used to be a ski area. I’m not sure why InfiNorth deleted it. Maybe send them a message or comment on the changeset.

I see, I probably can’t be of much help at the moment, but you may have luck contacting members of ACC Vancouver Island