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Better OSM Diary : ideas, reflexions, improvements

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OpenStreetMap NextGen DD #23 — MapLibre & Dark Theme

Great progress. Do you have a date for when public testing will start?

The problems with "highway=path" in England and Wales

It’s the additional tags that really make the difference (e.g. surface, lit tags). Just switching out a highway=path for a highway=footway doesn’t really tell you much more, if anything.

🌂 The Past, The Present, The Future

I can shed some light on Item 1. The code for the banner was simply re-used with a different image of the same dimensions as previous promotional campaigns. Those previous campaigns have typically been to raise awareness of the community run State of the Map conferences. I suspect when it was first done care was taken so that the close icon (cross in the top right corner) was more visible.

So in summary there was no bad intent to make it hard to find the close icon, just a volunteer working quickly to get something on line (quickly because it is their personal time they are volunteering) and they didn’t realise this. The alternative is to pay a professional services company to handle these things but even they make mistakes all the time!

Advanced StreetComplete

Awesome. Thank you for sharing - I need to get back into StreetComplete to test out some of these features.

Hedges as area features as well as linear ones

I think once it starts to cover a large non-linear area (as in your second example), calling it a hedge is not right. Instead it is an area of land that includes many of the same plants that you expect to see in a hedge. These are shrubs, trees, bushes. Looks like natural=scrub is the right tag (“uncultivated land covered with shrubs, bushes or stunted trees”). Indeed the wiki page for natural=shrub states “draw the area and tag it natural=scrub, and then you can map the individual shrubs by placing a node”. I also add nodes for large trees in hedgerows if I can be bothered.

So in summary, I don’t think area=yes on barrier=hedge is correct.

Community.osm.org - how's it going?

Like SK53 wrote, I find that reading more about other communities (i.e. non-UK for me) are doing, is the biggest benefit of the new forum.

And a few of the negatives don’t affect me. Firstly, despite using firefox on mobile, I don’t have the issue noted here. Loading times don’t bother me, and I find the interface intuitive enough that I haven’t needed documentation. I don’t recall ever noting anything wrong with the back button either and the “below the fold” point has never bothered me. In fact I wonder how important it is these days given that scrolling on a mobile is common on pretty much everything.

So all in all, a really good new addition. I now go here as my first place and check the other forums (e.g. talk-gb’s online achieve) second / less often.

UK Quarterly project 1 2023

Nice write up.

I’ve had two evenings working on Notes. The first was super successful and I closed close to 30. This evening was less productive at only 3! I ran across some wider map errors today so spent longer cleaning then up that actually addressing the notes. It was a good reminder that the quality of our map varies from place to place and largely depends on the amount of active skilled mappers monitoring an area for change (especially urban development).

I’m still undecided when to add data directly and when not too. A second source is not so important to me, but what is important is that the Note is clear and unambiguous. Close up photos in Notes are the harder one to deal with. I prefer Notes with photos that show the wider environment so that you can check positional accuracy against aerial imagery.

Finally, one thing I do when I close a note is look at the user on https://hdyc.neis-one.org/ and based on what I see, I make some suggestions for the mapper. I’m finding that I’m recommending the Every Door app regularly (which makes sense as I’m only reviewing notes created in StreetComplete so suggesting another app is a logical next step).

Happy mapping

Rob