Yay! That bit of south Derbyshire has been a bit neglected over the years. It’s great to have someone updating it regularly.

For info, there is a pub meetup in Derby on the 21st - see osm.wiki/Nottingham/Pub_Meetup (it’s in Nottingham 3 times out of 4 but in Derby 1 time out of 4). - SomeoneElse (Andy)

@GOwin That makes perfect sense - it’s the proper training (and the time to do it) that’s key.

Hi, What support and training was given to the students when they started mapping?

There were a number of problems with these users’ contributions, the most serious of which as a drag and drop of a large town in northern Sri Lanka 100km to the east. Several other new mappers drew a number of doodles in Europe and northern Canada which had to be reverted. A quick count up suggests that roughly half of all mappers identified as part of this project made changes so severe that had to be reverted.

Part of the problem was that the students were all starting with JOSM (which is simply inappropriate for someone who’s just starting out - a node drag of a large town is simply impossible in e.g. iD, yet in JOSM it’s frighteningly easy). One thing worth thinking about in the future for students’ first edits in JOSM - use the dev server. That way they can experiment and when they’ve got the hang of things can start mapping things for real.

Was any thought given to using existing learning resources? http://learnosm.org/en/ is one that springs to mind but there are other similar examples - I’m sure that a question to one of OSM’s mailing lists or the help site beforehand would have yielded more offers of existing “new mapper” toolkits. Unfortunately instead the OSM community had to spend time going through the contributions working out which were plausible and which were not.

Please take this comment in the spirit in which it is intended - not as an admonishment, but as something that might help avoiding these sorts of problems in the future. OSM needs new mappers, and the best new mappers for any area are the ones local to it - that’s why it’s great to see that a number of the students are now doing field-based mapping around Eastern University itself.

Best Regards, Andy (from the Data Working Group)

… and (as I should have said before hitting “save”), the subject of this diary post (is something best described as a footway or a cycleway, regardless of its legal status) is exactly why proper surveys are needed.

Also, if something’s definately a “public footpath” or “public bridleway” don’t forget to add it as such using the “designation” tag, so that maps that display such things can do so.

Personally I wouldn’t copy data from http://www.rowmaps.com/ , for a couple of reasons - one is that fact that it’s available there doesn’t mean that it’s suitably licenced for use in OSM, but the main one is that the footpaths actually in place in a certain area and what the council thinks it has are two very different things. You’ll only find out about the former by actually going there.

Looks great!

It’d be great if you didn’t have to scroll down to the bottom of the list on e.g. https://aleung.github.io/osm-visual-history/#/node/248436981 to get to the scroll bar at the bottom.

Can anything be done to reduce the memory use of e.g. https://aleung.github.io/osm-visual-history/#/relation/2767188 ? That’s a fairly extreme example, but memory use is a problem with OSM Deep History also.

Hello, For info, Spain’s already one of those boundaries that people “keep an eye on” because some of Spain’s southern border is also disputed. The issue with the southern border is part of what was discussed previously at https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=602864#p602864 and elsewhere.

More generally, there’s a sub-forum at https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=56862 that monitors all sorts of boundaries. Usually the problems found here aren’t “political”; just accidental editing errors.

Regards, Andy (DWG)

See https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=602864#p602864 for when this was last discussed in detail, and http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/d8/DisputedTerritoriesInformation.pdf for the general OSMF policy on such things.

Maybe because it’s pretty much a commodity these days (even built into some web browsers)?

For the OSM weekly we tend to offer both the original article and a translation. I tend to use whichever of Google Translate or Microsoft Translator seems to give the better answer, based on my knowledge of the original language.

Which online translation mechanism would you suggest should be built into OSM?

If the frontend to this is https://osmcha.mapbox.com/ then might I suggest actually linking to it somewhere near the top of the diary entry? That way people will know what it is about :)

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.