Thanks for the responses, I’ll try to keep doing this :)

I’d like to know what caused some of the things on the list, if anybody knows. For my part, I can explain new addesses in Moscow: we’ve got ahold of open data with these, and have imported around ¹⁄₃ of the set. There are ~4000 buildings with new address tags besides these address points. Each new address has to be verified manually, so the progress is very slow.

Hey, technically OSM is okay. We’ve got great skilled admins, we’ve got a data model to last, and a vast ecosystem of open code, from Leaflet to PostGIS and Nominatim, to support any kind of usage. It’s just we don’t progress in any way. The general community seems to be turning inward, dismissing any external developments with “OSM is open and eternal, they will be dead in 50 years anyway”.

Mikel,

That’s not what I’m expressing at all.

Really?

Get over it and help create the environment there you would like to see. Do the hard work of working through feedback. TomH does hard work reviewing all code. Help there too.

Do some work or put up money.

Create tools that help us manage the process of designing and integrating tags better.

There’s a ton to do here. Andy’s work is a great start.

Putting that aside, critique is what keeps communities / companies / governments going. That’s why we got media. As I said, I’ve been doing this since 2011. I see a list of problems and I know there is a lot to do in OpenStreetMap, that everyone can contribute to solving. It’s just the problems have grown from “we’ve got empty places on the map” to “we’ve got structural issues” in the recent years. Nevertheless, having something to look forward to is what keeps me going. But…

I’ll admit, I’m having a difficult time showing you respect right now, after you let your frustration with OSM get the best of you.

THIS is what makes people leave OpenStreetMap in frustration. No matter how much you’ve mapped, how much tools you’ve developed, how many people have you gathered at mapping parties and conferences, the moment you express anything but positivity and loyalty, you stop being respected. Even by members of The Board. You did well, but words are what matters: you said the wrong words, we don’t respect you any more, please leave.

It’s like in Russia since 1917 till now (sorry for the metaphor): experience does not matter, loyalty does. That’s why we in Russia has got strong aversion to any forced positivity masking issues, to shutting up the media and asking “Why couldn’t you express instead positivity and thanks?” That’s why this article was received well in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, and met with perplexed irritation by US and Western Europe people.

Gregory, thanks for the suggestion. I assure you I did not write this to get upvotes. OSM doesn’t get much critique: I remember just one other article this year. That is too bad. It is like having a big development team, but no QA, because pointing out bugs is negativity, could not they write some more code instead?

I agree this article could do with more positive comments. I tried to outline all good things in the “map style” section — and you see how people who worked on it still take it as personal attacks, because of the context. There are many positive articles on all things OSM: just WeeklyOSM alone shows how many great stuff is developed or otherwise done each week. We had a surge of such articles after Google had announced their new pricing. We all know why and how OSM is the best map out there.

Finally, I came to despise the “do it yourself or gtfo” attitude, common to open projects, that Mikel’s expressing in his latest comment. It reads as “your work for the past N years, however useful it was, doesn’t count. You have to enlist to all working groups (and/or pay a lot of money) and do all the other things instead”. You ask me to respect work of many developers in OSM (and I told you I did — by showcasing it for five years in a daily news blog, for example), but don’t show any respect to my work.

Blake, thanks for the follow-up, it is very good.

Kocio, I’m pretty sure you know many issues with the data. Like the recent issue with borders, or with generalisation, or with multiple meanings for POIs (amenity+office). I am pretty sure you’ve got a great community around the map style and can produce several more, trying out different stacks. I wish you nothing but luck and more contributors :)

Mboeringa, your style looks pretty, apart from a few issues, like unlabelled roads or shifted halo on some labels. Please continue :) But to compare it with other styles means to understand the purpose of all styles. Some are made to make a standalone map, some — to serve as a basemap for other data. When comparing your map to Stamen’s Toner, you sure won’t blame it for bleakness and lack of colour. The same for Google: it was made as a background for POIs (and ads), and for other people’s markers. In that regard, it is pretty good.

Geonick, thanks for the reply. I’ve been writing articles on OpenStreetMap’s impending doom since 2011. At the same time I love the project, I highly respect all its contributors and developers with their work, and I believe in its victorious future.

Articles like this are an attempt at indexing the project issues, and at the same time at provoking constructive thoughts in readers. There will be follow-ups on Shtosm (I’m writing the next one), but I doubt I’ll have the will to translate them to English.

Sorry Paul, I’ve added a remark that it was just my understanding.

Regarding the comments, I must say I am astonished. Especially when comparing reactions here with responses in the russian and some other smaller communities. All I can say is that when criticism is taken personally or perceived as an attack, it is the most prominent sign of major issues with a project / establishment / company / government.

I agree with Christoph, transliterations are very important. Even we in maps.me use libicu for that — grateful to Sven for showing the way in his FOSS4G talk.

Christoph, thank you for the thoughtful comment. I agree with most of your points, and I don’t have all the answers, of course. Otherwise I’d still be on the Board. I don’t like proposals in their current form, because they hurt the map, and I have some ideas about that. By lack of control in styling I mostly mean lack of strategy and vision. OSM-Carto contributors, which do great job, would probably agree: I basically retold Paul’s SotM talk in my own, harsher words. I agree that change should not be for the change itself, but I tried to show a few areas where it might help.

Andy, I am very sorry you took it all personally. I follow your work and all of it is great. You basically revived our mapping style, and now you are doing important work in the website code that nobody had time or will to do. You should remember that besides these awful articles I also do OSM Awards, I highlight new developments in Shtosm blog and twitter (in Russian), and organize meetups to make more creative people visible. That doesn’t mean I cannot attempt at seeing and critiquing a bigger picture. I am not moaning: listing issues is the first step to solving them. I did not like Serge’s list, so I made my own.

The osm-carto style is definitely not a failure. I celebrated every breakthrough you and other contributors had: converting and refactoring it, merging footways and paths, changing road colours, improving borders, and so on. Yes, it’s bleak, like every other popular style, but that’s okay. Good for a base layer. What I’d really like is to have options. I see that style developers are looking into them, and I am looking forward to change.

I don’t count you in the guardians of the website: you don’t take part in deciding which pull requests get merged and which are left to rot, you just do your work in improving the internals. I like that there is work going on, though I’d prefer some kind of commitee or a set of policies for website development. I’ve seen too many developers who started learning Rails development and writing pull requests, only to be shot down. You would have so much more to refactor if we managed the community right.

Pizzaiolo, the data is not yours. But it cannot be owned by anybody else, Google cannot take it. Look, maps.me works solely on and because of OpenStreetMap, and has our map suffered from it? To me, it has more eyes and more editors than earlier. If Google took all our data and added to its map — with attribution, of course — we would have exposure like never before, and more people would come to us, because they would have a choice between “only Google” and “Google, Mapbox, MAPS.ME and everyone else”.

Dzertanoj, vendettas and anarchy are the only way to go! Don’t change.

Mikel, sorry that you feel this way. I am not good with English, so I might have been more harsh here than in the original text. The only finger-pointing here is towards the website maintainers, I could not resist it, and I am sorry. Everything else is not negativity, it is an attempt to find issues we can solve. I hope you, as a member of the Board, could take something from the article to you meetings. Like, to try strategic planning, or to find more goals to the project besides providing the data.

Maybe employ interval=* tag with an average interval in minutes?

osm.wiki/Proposed_features/Interval

This is a bad idea and simply creates a lot of duplicate data in OSM, which will definitely fall out of sync in a couple years.

Nice code though.

I assumed it’s obvious this fictional text is not about individual mappers, but of something else :)

1. You do not violate any laws by using Telegram here. Telegram Inc. and VPN owners do.
2. The official comms channel is Russian Forum. Telegram is an extra, just like IRC was. And Russian IRC is not used for a long time, the last IRC user switched to Telegram this year.
3. Not listing the telegram channel in the iD panel would mean losing people who already have Telegram installed, but don’t have time to learn tech from 90s to participate in forum discussions. We are drastically lowering the bar for new users by providing them with the Telegram group option.

that criteria is difficult to translate into rules a computer can apply

Well, this applies to all but the first four items on your list. And the fourth one is questionable.

And you are starting to discuss imports, not their detection.

Again, I am pretty sure you cannot tell a proper import from a regular edit. Regarding the source cirteria, you never know what a mapper used for tracing or tagging, the same as with imports.

There are no imports. Import is an invented construct made by Germans to try to keep their map in check. That’s why no matter what algorithm you choose, you’d get tons of false positives and false negatives.

All imagery is offset. Including DigitalGlobe imagery and GeoCenter’s. To use it properly, you must first download GPS traces and offset the imagery, so they align with roads. After that you should save the offset into the imagery offset database, so you have something to point new mappers to.

Then, if somebody breaks your data, that does not mean they are paid by some evil company specifically to disrupt your business. Chill. This is OSM, it is always broken. If you wanted to make a perfect geodata, you’d use qgis and shapefiles. Mappers here are volunteers who map for fun and dislike a corporate attitude like yours.

Finally, if JOSM shows a warning, that does not mean data is broken. JOSM validator is very opinionated.

Полностью согласен с первой половиной поста.

1. Angle around 0° means the order of the stops is incorrect. Like, instead of “A→B→C→D→E” in the route relation there is “A→B→D→C→E”.
2. It’s okay, it is only a warning. I recommend using “platform_entry_only” and “platform_exit_only” roles.
3. Please check the first and last station of these route relations. As I can see from the YAML dump, they both have “Westkreuz” as the last station. The validator expects for every “A→B” route to find a corresponding “B→A”.

Hi Toni,

Thanks for looking into fixing the Munich S-Bahn. The error means that the node 737174134 is a part of a route relation, a stop in this case. For it, the validator needs to find a corresponding subway station object. It does so via a stop_area relation that the node should be in. It is — but the relation does not include the station node. Adding it to the stop_area relation will solve the issue.

I have added the Valencia system, will be up in 3-4 hours.

Thanks for writing and, I believe, testing all of this. I sometimes visit switch2osm just for these instructions. The links you gave are also very valuable, I haven’t seen Ircama’s before.

Do you think at this point the whole instruction should be just “docker up wherever/openstreetmap”? Following the same steps for 4 years seems to be a bit redundant in 2018.