OpenStreetMap
Report a problem
Арахецна SimonPoole 19 January 2014, мотт: English ТӀаьххьара карладаккхар 20 January 2014.One of the issues the OSM site has had, is that we have been missing a trivial “Report a problem” / “Fix the map” landing page on openstreetmap.org. Not that it was in any way difficult to do, we just had never added one. I suspect that the absence of such a page is one of the reasons why the OSMF board now and then gets complaints about things missing on the map to its e-mail addresses and even more times the DCMA take down form is misused for such purposes.
Now, with the redesign live and google making the concept popular the time was ripe to add one at last, nothing fancy, but linking to OSM in the fashion below is a lot better than simply dumping people on our main page:
osm.org/fixthemap?lat=47.39756&lon=8.3976
(a zoom parameter will work too).
Дийцар
Коммент stragu 19 January 2014 22:30
It’s a shame there is no obvious direct link to this page on the main page. How did you get to it?
Коммент SimonPoole 19 January 2014 22:36
Note quite sure why you would want to get to it from the OSM main page, the page is directed to people that have seen or believe to have seen a concrete issue and not to “normal” visitors.
Коммент bolomap 20 January 2014 03:02
Maybe I also don’t understand correctly but this does not seem to fix the issue you list.
From what I can tell the issue is that people are accustomed to a ‘report a problem’ / ‘fix the map’ link on a map. For one reason or another they do not realise you can edit the map themselves so go out of their way to seek out a contact form to kindly let OSM know.
The current link is helpful at replying to these people but why not just address the issue at the source? This method currently wastes both OSM and these ‘helpers’ time, reducing the chance of getting there issue addressed.
I believe that on the homepage there should be a ‘found an error’/’fix a map’ link when users are not signed in. This would avoid cluttering the homepage for ‘normal’/registered users and further serves to encourage participation to new users.
I feel the new design is a huge step in usability especially for new users but you can never put too much polish on the little things.
Коммент SimonPoole 20 January 2014 09:17
@bolomap the landing page is for third parties to link to, so it needs to give a short explanation what the project is about, how to help and for those that have a complaint that is not really map related pointers to the correct places to address.
Коммент Vincent de Phily 20 January 2014 11:25
Even though it is redundant, I still think it’d be a good idea to link to that page from the main page (next to the attribution/donation links), because it makes it more discoverable :
Коммент CloCkWeRX 20 January 2014 15:20
The ‘add a note’ control could really use a tooltip or similar that says “Add a note… about a problem”