(to add to what Mateusz said above) you can see what the Community Index suggests for an area by looking at https://openstreetmap.community/ . I presume you’re seeing OSM-US’ Slack mentioned because you’re editing in the US. Depending on where in the world you are you might get a mailing list appearing first, or a Telegram channel, or something else. For me it suggests a pub meeting at the top of the list. OSMF can’t really dictate where local mappers choose to communicate (“yes - you can create a Facebook group, but don’t dare talk about maps in there!”) and it makes sense to me for iD et al to point to where other local mappers actually are.

Sometimes there will be separate groups that don’t cross over much (for example, the frequent posters of the “talk” mailing list and the OpenStreetMap Telegram group are mostly different people) and that’s OK; people are people, and don’t always fit into “organised” hierarchies.

Apparently Natural Earth has broken again, and OSM Carto has added a workaround to their script, so the net result is no change should be needed to these tutorials.

I have to say I’m somewhat puzzled by some of the suggestions in here. Just to take one example (email) the suggestion seems to be move away Google Workspace (which is what G Suite is now called) and to move to something hosted by someone else? I can think of several reasons to avoid relying on Google for email, but “FOSS” isn’t really one of them. If the purpose is to avoid relying on a third-party which may be blocked, how does using a different third party help? For completeness, and as I’m sure you’re aware (though others may not be), the OSMF already runs both Google-hosted and internally-hosted non-Google email infrastructure.

Whilst I understand what Richard’s saying above with regard to e.g. github and Google Docs, I do have more sympathy there. Imagine we had a board member from somewhere like Iran (and why not - there’s a large vibrant OSM community there). Anyone from anywhere on this list would have difficulties participating in anything if Google Docs access was assumed.

I suspect that you’re probably going to have to provide a bit more detail about what the problem is…

• Which OSM map are you talking about? One of the map layers visible at openstreetmap.org (and if so which one) or somewhere else?

• Is it a new problem? If so, when was it previously OK?

• What country in the world are you in?

• What device are you using to access OSM data?

The DWG gets lots of complaints from people about sites that incorporate some data from OSM, but are also based on something else. People misunderstanding Facebook properties’ maps are the largest proportion by far, but most major re-users of OSM data appear somewhere on the list.

Depending on the nature of the complaint they might crop up in DWG reports as “misdirected”, “international” or “3rd party complaint”.

@cRaIgalLAn > I noticed that the comment referred to was perhaps angry and raised a threat

Presumably the threat you refer to is “if you violated the rules, you will be banned from editing”? Are you seriously suggesting that people who violated the rules should (if all else fails) not be banned from editing?

we choose to be nice to newbies without any exceptions

You’re correct that we do try and help people understand what OSM is and how OSM works. We (the DWG) get lots of requests along the lines of “your website does not show my country’s claimed boundaries” (when those claimed boundaries don’t match the reality on the ground). We get lots of accusations of “being on the side of the other side” in border disputes (often by both sides).

However, an account that has signed up purely to create two political diary entries and (despite the encouragement above) hasn’t done any OSM mapping probably isn’t here to improve the quality of OSM in China or elsewhere. We certainly ought to give everyone the benefit of the doubt (hence my reply above) but sometimes it is necessary to be direct as well.

For anyone unaware of the background here, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-55851052 et al. You could certainly argue that the statement by Wu Qian reported there “constitutes a threat”.

Various stone types, including Ogham stones, are now shown on this map. I can have a go at adding some of the other archaeological site types etc. as well.

One of the most common features that I remember from Australian roadside rest areas was the bottle-o - surprised that those haven’t been mentioned, or is that just a WA thing?

Hello,

For more information about OSM handles territorial disputes, please read https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/d8/DisputedTerritoriesInformation.pdf .

Best Regards,

Andy, from OSM’s Data Working Group (see https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Data_Working_Group for who we are)

@DaveF agreed - when I fixed one of the southern English ones I drew a new line in deliberately rather than re-use a bit of railway. Didn’t put a note on it though - that would have been a good idea.

@mmd - thanks for that. Is there any documentation on what that actually means? For example I can see references to “make stat” at osm.wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_API_by_Example#Making_a_Table_of_Object_Versions but not much about why it’s needed.

For now, however, I don’t know how to delete this diary entry.

As a moderator I can hide it if you want, but it seems a bit drastic - why not just edit it so it’s got a caveat at the top saying “we can’t don’t do this until 2023”?

I’ve added a sentence along those lines at https://github.com/switch2osm/switch2osm.github.io/pull/145 . To be honest, there are lots of places where guides such as this just need “a few more words” to explain why you’d do something (and not just switch2osm - some of the OSM Carto notes would benefit from updates too). As you see more, I’d suggest making pull requests directly - I’m sure the effort would be appreciated.

Following a couple of comments and some corrections, I’ve now linked this into the menus.

Thanks - we (the DWG) occasionally get complaints about people trying to “game” editing statistics (by e.g. editing the same thing over and over again) but I don’t remember any about empty changesets.

How about posting the site at WeeklyOSM?

You can submit it - the link is http://weeklyosm.eu/this-news-should-be-in-weeklyosm.

changeset counts are simply not a good metric for anything. Well, they’re a good measure of how often click a particular “edit” button (unrelated to how much data was changed, of course).

It’d be interesting to link to the sites / editors behind these. I’m surprised to see a local site for one purpose “Refill Südtirol” so high up the list, for example.

Great!

I also want to upload how to build my instance detailed.

That’d definitely be useful for people who want to create their own (perhaps for a region that doesn’t have one already?).

One question though - the tag cloud at http://taginfo.openstreetmap.pe.kr/ looks very different to the one at https://taginfo.geofabrik.de/asia/south-korea - is updating that a separate step?

If there’s one change that you could make to improve the situation, what would it be?

I wonder if a way forward might be to invite the new contributors to chat with the local community more widely (OSM US’ Slack or elsewhere), to talk about things like “what imagery is good to use” etc.?