To be honest, I wouldn’t worry too much about “very little landuse”. It’s actually easier to add other features (POIs, hedges, ditches etc.) before landuse has been mapped, and if you’ve surveyed all the hedges etc. adding landuse is also much easier.

There has been a bit of a problem in GB with “remote upland mapping” - people wanting to “colour in” landuse and making a bit of a mess of it, either by drawing very rough landuse boundaries (far less accurate than the existing work that people have done) or by just “getting it wrong” - picking something rendered by the OSM Carto stylesheet (“heath”) regardless of whether the thing they’re mapping is remotely heathland, or even “heathland in OSM terms”, or not. https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2017-September/thread.html#20643 is one thread on talk-gb, but not the only one, as it’s been an ongoing issue.

As to what thing on the ground matches what “natural” OSM tag, that’s probably one for the mailing lists - https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2017-September/020645.html is an attempt to map existing non-OSM classifications as a basis for this.

With regard to “ Still waiting for someone to come up with a rendering for Fell” why not have a go yourself? If you want “a slippy map like the OSM website” then if you follow https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04-2-lts/ you’ll get one (see also https://ircama.github.io/osm-carto-tutorials/ ), and modifying that to say “treat natural=fell like natural=heath, but with a slightly different colour” would actually be pretty straightforward.

What is slightly complicated is that natural=fell is actually used for a variety of features (see http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/rX4 ) so you might need to do a bit of head-scratching to see if you wanted to also include a special “fell” rendering for osm.org/way/518304766 or osm.org/node/773534919 .

Other people have been mentioning similar things: https://www.reddit.com/r/openstreetmap/comments/71rstf/mapbox_not_incorporating_recent_osm_edits/ . It’s not related to OSM itself, but to the supplier that Snapchat has outsourced their map updates from. Talk to Snapchat or their map supplier about it.

@escada I think they’re trying to get a place to appear in a map in Snapchat, which I suspect uses an OSM-based map from Mapbox.

@ain%20albaraha I see that you’ve made a number of edits already. Changes will appear at osm.org/#map=13/24.7680/43.8094 relatively quickly, but may take longer to appear in the map in Snapchat - someone from Snapchat or their map supplier would have to answer that question.

@butrus_butrus “ways with a node for every half a metre length” are a real problem if those nodes don’t add any extra value (e.g. if it’s a straight line), or if they’re in the wrong place (which can happen if the accuracy of the underlying data is good enough to say within 1/2m in any given direction.

With anything in OSM someone somewhere will always want to come along and improve it later, and if 500 nodes are used when 5 would do then we’re making that person’s work much harder.

It’s a different user. What I’d suggest rather than (or perhaps as well as) writing a diary entry about a problem like this is to actually try and help the mapper make better contributions. Currently they’ve created 13 changesets, and no-one has commented on any of them.

Given that they’re a brand new mapper I’d suggest a “hello and welcome” comment in the first instance, then trying to explain where it’s appropriate to use “motorway” and where it isn’t.

Oh - and thanks for patching up the data :)

Any chance of a link to the area? I’m aware of a suspicious “trunk road adder” in China (who isn’t actually a HOT contributor as far as I am aware) and it’d be useful to see if the trunk roads above (a) are the same user and (b) match anything on any imagery.

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/2781 may be a related issue, and a proposed fix for that is https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/2790 .

I don’t think that it is a data change - osm.org/way/63565739 has not changed for a year. It’s likely related to the latest release of the map style that OSM’s “standard” map uses https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/releases/tag/v4.2.0 .

Which map are you looking at?

osm.org/way/63565739 still is both a tram and a tertiary road. Perhaps the map that you are using has changed the way that roads and tramlines display?

I’m guessing that you’re talking about OSM’s “standard” rendering here (there are lots of others)?

It’s developed over here, and there have been lots of discussions over the years over what should and what should not be included.

In order to see the effect of any change, I’d suggest that you have a play with the rendering yourself and see what it looks like. There’s a set of tutorials here, and if you want to set up a tile server from scratch you can follow the instructions here.

I particularly like the “low bridge detector” :)

@alan_gr Unfortunately, the wiki isn’t always “authoritative”. In https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2017-August/020486.html I described a situation where I changed the wiki to reflect current practice, but it was changed back because current practice was “wrong”. My options at this point were to get into a wiki edit war (I’d probably win that, since I am through historical accident a wiki admin, but it would (a) be a very silly waste of everyone’s time and (b) something of an abuse of powers) or to get on with something more constructive, which is what I decided to do.

The best advice for new mappers is “stick with the editor presets”, and follow the iD editor walkthrough, which is a great introduction to “how to map”. In iD if you add a point and search for “bus stop”, a highway=bus_stop is exactly what you will get.

I believe that the “more simple tag” is “highway=bus_stop”. In the UK it’s 33 times more likely to be used that public_transport=stop_position.

More complicated tagging isn’t “wrong” of course - but there’s no need to make things more complicated than they need to be. The only roadside public transport infrastructure in most of the UK are bus stops, so it makes sense to just map those.

Thanks for writing this. There have been quite a few times over the years when people have asked how to get an OSM-based map onto a device with an unfeasibly small amount of storage, and there hasn’t been a good answer to point people at before now.

Hi tigermilk and welcome to OSM!

Just in case you’re not aware, the next East Midlands OSM meetup is in Nottingham on Tuesday Evening at the Lincolnshire Poacher up Mansfield Road. You’re welcome to come along and say hello!

Best Regards,

Andy

Maybe those comments weren’t always polite :)

More seriously, a comment such as “you have broken a multipolygon here” will not communicate anything to someone who does not know what a multipolygon is.

Of course, there are genuine issues with e.g. MAPS.ME users not replying to comments. Part of that is because MAPS.ME users sometimes don’t even know what OSM is, so to find it “talking to them” is very unexpected. Also matching the language of the comment to the language of the mapper is important (not everyone speaks English, and web translation these days is good enough that they’ll at least get the sense of the problem, so there’s no excuse not to).

Actually, that editor that you don’t know how to spell has the QA cues built into the UI, not as an afterthought at upload time - see for example osm.org/#map=18/56.51881/-5.75593 , where the duplicate nodes appear as red pustules saying “fix me now!”.

More seriously, the reasons why contributors don’t correct their own work include:

• They’re new editors, still finding their way. Everyone needs to be allowed to get it wrong a few times as they learn how to edit OSM (whatever editor they are using).
• No-one has actually told them that something is a problem. If people don’t know about QA tools they won’t know that they exist. The best way to get in contact with new mappers is to comment (politely!) in a changeset discussion. Anything that just sounds like “you’re doing it wrong!” is unhelpful, even if they really are doing it wrong.
• The QA tool is wrong. JOSM’s validator is good, but still “cries wolf” quite a lot of the time, because not everywhere in the world is like Germany.
• What’s been uploaded is only the “first draft”. For example, last night I uploaded this. It was important to upload it because it’s a major change to the area, but it’s far from complete, and there will be many things in there that need refining based on further survey. JOSM’s validator there finds 1 error and 186 warnings, most of which are indications that further survey is needed (e.g. highway crossing building is obviously wrong, but which is in the right place?). Some of what JOSM’s validator says there are just completely invalid, and it’s up to the mapper to work out which and why.

It’s not just “these estates” - some leafy suburbs also don’t have as good a covering of local mappers as they might have either.

Take for example osm.org/#map=17/51.63477/-0.10301 (Winchmore Hill). Basically schools yes, station and bus stops yes, pubs yes (but little detail), shops mostly no.

DWG here. Yes, drop us a mail (to data@osmfoundation.org ) and include any extra info you can as per the “I’ve seen a problem; what should I do?” section of http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Data_Working_Group .

With regard to bans, there’s actually an OSMF policy on that - http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Ban_Policy . I’ve been active in trying to calm down the “language wars” in Kosovo - trying to ensure that names used match names used locally and name:XX language names are available for use by anyone making maps. The “ban list” is at the top of osm.org/user_blocks/ , and most of those are vandals, spammers and fantasy mappers.

Usually with people making politically-motivated changes we change it back to a reasonable “on the ground, non-inflammatory” version and ensure that enough info is in there to allow everyone to make their map too. Occasionally this takes a bit of to and fro, and sometimes where the answer is less obvious we try and ask all interested parties to put their views forward and arbitrate on that (as we did with Western Sahara / Morocco / Spain last year).

The “if you move away from it” issue is less of a problem with tabbed browsers everywhere these days; the bigger issue is that there is no one zoom level at which all of the map legend is sensibly visible! Another problem is agressive caching by e.g. mobile web browsers - it can be difficult to persuade an area to redisplay even if reendered on the server.

I’ll probably end up with black boxes around groups of legend items with a label that appears at all zoom levels (saying “zoom in to see more” or similar). It might even be worth having special rendered map features just for the legend (rather than misusing place=locality for some of the names as now).

Even as it is though, it’s hugely useful for QA - I spotted several errors such as “name not displayed” in the style only after I’d created the map legend. As it stands it’s probably only about 20% complete (or maybe 40% complete of style-unique features).