But does it have a beer and an airline?

First things first, obviously Betteridge’s law of headlines applies here. :)

To be clear about one thing - the user blocks list is not a “list of shame”. As described on the DWG’s wiki page, blocks ‘don’t imply that users have done anything wrong, and often contain friendly language to try and communicate that fact. Usually before any block is applied (even a “0-hour message that has to be read”) attempts will be made to contact the mapper, such as via changeset discussion comments’.

It’s also meaningless to try and equate blocks (or OSM accounts) with actual human users. Where one user (or a group of users) has created multiple accounts to try and “make a particular edit” in spite of their being problems with it (real examples: change all the tracks in an area to roads so that their preferred Garmin map shows them; changing their school’s name to something like “please don’t give us any homework”) then the number of blocks per user or even per OSM object might be very high; they don’t mean that more OSM users are proportionately being blocked.

As Mikel is I think trying to suggest, it would be possible to obtain details of the actual incident from the block(s) associated with it (and “incident” will most often be “hello and welcome to OSM, some people are trying to help you”). Excluding data from deleted users, OSM changeset, object and block data is public, so any OSM user can do that (I’m assuming here that OSM’s eventual GDPR implementation will somewhat resemble what Geofabrik and HDYC have already done).

Best Regards Andy (from the DWG, but writing in a personal capacity)

In a diary that’s shared between people of many different cultures and languages, I wouldn’t assume that anything was obvious, actually.

http://osmtools.org/ just looks to be domain parked right now. I’d suggest contacting whoever you think created it.

@Marcos Dione That sounds plausible, yes. Although it’s a proprietary channel there’s an “open sign-up” page somewhere, though obviously you’d want to archive anything you want to keep as obviously they can take it away at any stage in the future.

I’d imagine that most OSM CartoCSS people who use IRC will either be in #osm or #osm-dev, so I’m not convinced that a new IRC channel would get that many people in it. No harm in trying to create a new channel of course and see who turns up.

Another possibility might be https://gis.stackexchange.com/ (but you’d need a well-defined question there not just “help!”) or maybe the US-based Slack might have some US-based CartoCSS people in it.

Do you think at this point the whole instruction should be just “docker up wherever/openstreetmap”?

It rather depends on what you’re trying to do, I think. If you’re already familiar with Docker etc. and “just want to render some tiles”, then quite possibly. If you’re not, or you want to set up a server to serve custom tiles in an app, or you want to understand more about how everything hangs together, then probably not. The idea behind these guides is that you can follow them with essentially no existing knowledge. The carto docker guide just throws you at this page and expects you to figure out for yourself what you need.

Following the same steps for 4 years seems to be a bit redundant in 2018.

The “obvious bit missing” to me is an equivalent guide for some sort of vector mapping. OpenMapTiles is a whole lot nearer to that than it used to be, but it’s not quite a solution to the same problem.

Something like this? See also this PDF.

(re tag removal) JOSM, and some other editors, will remove some imported or previously set tags that subsequent discussions have suggested are best removed. See the comments at osm.wiki/Key:created_by for example.

I am very surprised that you consider it to be “fairly straightforward” (!!!) to get hundreds of command-line steps working. I mean, I’ve done a fair bit of Linux development, and I’d schedule several days to get something like that working; for the general mapper, that’s clearly a non-starter.

The entire text of the page is only 402 lines long, and most of that is description. Based on my experience if you’ve done it before I’d estimate it would take about 2-3 hours to cut and paste the commands onto a server and complete the data load (if for a relatively small region) - including the documented tea breaks!

How, exactly, does having ones own map server help with that?

In at least two specific ways:

1. If there’s a group of people working on a lightly mapped area (perhaps a HOT or similar project) then a server that’s under their control is capable of rendering whatever tiles they want, at whatever zoom level, whenever they want. This is not currently possible with the tile layers on osm.org for all sorts of reasons, including the “long tail” of applications fighting for those same free tiles.
2. You’re not limited to the tile styles currently displayed on the OSM website. OSM’s standard style is a compromise designed to cover vast deserts and tightly-packed cities. It’s limited to a relatively conservative maximum zoom level which prevents a lot of detail being visible but suppresses what might be important features in some places (paths and tracks, say) when zoomed out.

You say above that the situation is “sad”, and I’m trying to help provide a solution. There’s always room for improvement of course - an opportunity for someone to create a better mousetrap - but to say “All the ways that used to exist, to get visual or numerical feedback or progress metrics, are gone” isn’t remotely true.

Re “Refreshing the map after doing major edits”, I wouldn’t currently rely on any of the maps available at osm.org for this, for the reasons that you describe. For a number of people working in a relatively lightly-mapped area it’d be fairly straightforward to set up a temporary rendering of just that area, and have the tiles as up to date as you like (since you’re not fighting for resources with all OSM mappers worldwide). The switch2osm guide would be a good place to start for this, and most countries or regions could be happily rendered by a bit of spare time on an off-the-shelf desktop PC or equivalent.

I also wouldn’t assume that all comments on diary entries** are anything other than the contributor’s personal view :)

With regard to trees / woodland / forest et al there’s been a lot of discussion about the various tags in use and what they “actually mean”. This page describes 6 approaches. For trees, the main tags used are landuse=forest with 3 million examples and natural=wood with 4.5 million. By contrast, landcover=trees has 19,000. If it expresses what you want to get across by all means use it as a tag but do be aware that many data consumers will be confused by it.

More generally, I wouldn’t worry too much about landuse (at all), especially not about “covering the entire globe”. It’s far more useful to know that roads and paths are present and correct, and that shops and offices (that people actually visit) are up to date.

** including this one

@AkuAnakTimur What gets rendered on OSM maps (including the 4 that are available on osm.org) doesn’t depend what’s in the wiki (proposals etc.). It’s mostly to do with the tag having a clear meaning and being widely used across the world (see the discussions about new tags at e.g. the standard style’s github issues list for more detail).

Of course, if you want to create your own maps that show this tag with a particular icon, you can.

Silly question, but what does “STOM” stand for here? This suggests various possibilities, the only vaguely “geo” one of which is “safe transport of munitions” which seems unlikely…

Also, is there a place for open questions like this?

The help site is great for specific “how do I do X” questions, but for more open questions I’d just suggest a diary entry :)

As an aside:

I don’t know why it made some of my text bold from my previous response.

Comments here use Markdown, and sometimes things in “ordinary text” get interpreted as formatting. If you hit “preview” before “save” you should get a chance to review and correct.

@PlaneMad Agreed that we could create wikidata entries for every “OSM tag XYZ” as distinct from “the English concept XYZ”; I’m just not clear what that buys us over and above an existing OSM wiki article that can be translated into other languages? It just makes the whole thing harder to maintain.

At the risk of stating the obvious there are a few steps to be carried out before actually doing the import, as described at osm.wiki/Import/Guidelines .

Or you could just translate the text of the OSM wiki page using an online translation tool? The problem with using wikipedia / wikidata for this is that the words that OSM uses to describe things often don’t match the dictionary definition (in any language, even British English) of those things, even for basic things like “city”.

Obviously online translation quality varies by language, and not all languages have available online translations but by using the OSM wiki text rather than source data from wikipedia (which is where 99% of wikidata came from) it’ll at least describe OSM, rather than something that might appear the same but actually is subtly different.

@LivingWithDragons Personally, I don’t tend to map cattle grids (or gates for that matter) as ways, but some people do, so it made sense to me to try and render them.

The wiki has a bit of a dual personality - to “describe how people map” and to “tell people how to map” . I tend to think that the former is what it should be doing more of, but there are certainly people who think it should be for the latter. In this particular case I don’t really understand why the wiki thinks that a cattle grid is never a linear feature whereas for example a gate can be. They’re often right next to each other and exactly the same width!