Welcome! Let’s get mapping

In 13th Century England the following two, apparently contradictory, statements are both true:– Most people were born, lived & died within the same 5 mile (8km) radius. England was covered with a network of streets & roads each many hundreds of miles long; further, these streets & roads were continually thronged with people travelling long distances upon them.

So those aren’t necessarily contradictory. One simple solution: 90% of the population was born/lived/died in their home village, and 10% of the population went all over the country.

You’re kinda blowing my mind with some of those projections…. Fascinating stuff!

At State of the Map 2016 Frederik Ramm gave a talk about mechanical edits. (video here). You should watch it, it’s very relevant to what you’re talking about. He specifically gives examples of typos in common tags like building. He’s not in favour of automated edits like you suggest, claiming the strength of OSM is having humans looking at things and fixing them, and mechanical edits are not like that.

I’d suggest a MapRoulette task to fix up these things if you’d like. You will then have people looking at the area around the problem and can probably find a better fix than what the bot would do.

I suppose one reason Wikipedia has more bots is because Wikipedia is edited with a plain text box, so it’s easy to make typos or simple mistakes. But OSM has software for editing, so people often use presets, rather than having to type in building=yes all the time. This probably reduces the error rate of mappers.

Me personally, I wouldn’t be opposed to mass changing it. However, as you point out, it’s not a lot of instances of this problem, so it wouldn’t be too hard to just use MapRoulette.

I agree. OSM must only contain real, verified data. And some Pokemon Go users don’t do that. But people have been adding nonsense data to OSM since the dawn of time (2004).

You can donate data and wait when somebody will pick it up:

Wikidata is CC0 “Public domain” licenced. This data is OSM derived, so you can’t import it into Wikidata. I also won’t donate my data to a non-share-alike, corporate friendly licence like CC0.

I’m sure Wikidata is great. And it’s something I’d like to know more about. But I don’t have the time now. And what I have works now, so I don’t want to go writing everything to rely on an external service which has a more full featured and complicated data model, when it’s not going to provide any benefit.

Thing that I can access data using SPARQL/CSV query without a line of code other than SPARQL. Not only it is perfect, it takes 4 minutes to do so and data will be up-to-date.

I have 65,000 objects. Can I make that many queries to Wikidata? At 4 minutes a pop, it’ll take 6 months to populate my database. I’m currently updating townlands.ie every day, and want to keep that.

(that query link takes less than 4 minutes for me, probably caching)

That all look really complicated, and looks like I’d have to learn how Wikidata works. It’s something I’d like to learn, but I don’t have the time right now. I’d also have to query a US server, which has obviously bad privacy implications.

It’s not impossible to have it in OSM, because I’ve already put it in OSM. name:1556--1922=King's County is pretty readable. Sure it might not be as full featured as other systems, but it works, it’s readable, it’s easy to enter, and it’s deployed now. “Perfect is the enemy of done” and all that. 😄

Impressive, but now I prefer Wikidata for this task, e.g. “Ленинград”: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q656#P1448 and https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q656#P17

Cool. I don’t really know anything about wikidata or how to use it though, so I kept it all in OpenStreetMap

Objects like this osm.org/way/331415576 are still tagged in a wrong manner

It’s been fixed now. I missed that one. It just goes to show that we need a community of humans looking at the map. 😄

What about just extending a previously existing relation? Should we just remove the filter in the second line?

I’m not sure what you mean. This overpass query is for finding new, un-relation’ed, rivers. If there’s an existing waterway relation which is missing some parts, then yes, you should add those ways to the correct relation.

Another thing very common in Europe is very long rivers that go through several countries, hence having different names. The most clear example, the Danube, has all these names:

The Danube is already mapped as a relation in OSM: Relation 89652. It has all the appropriate name:XX multilingual tags, however the name tag is set to “Donau”. I’m unsure if that’s correct, but I’m unsure what a correct name tag should be.

However JOSM has a very useful “Download from Overpass API” feature

Also, what’s the name of the plugin who provides this?

That feature should be in JOSM without needing any plugins I think? Maybe you need to turn on “Expert mode” in the settings to see it?

Have fun!

Sounds like it’s something you should start? :)

Sounds like it’s something you should start? :)

It’s based on who created the object in OSM, using a library I wrote for the purpose osm-find-first.

I think this is wonderful, and love the idea of topic-specific editors. I think OSM needs to “go deeper”, and these sort of tools can make that possible.

Now to figure out what “12oz” “drip” and “house coffee” mean. :)

Hi @stephan75, Thanks for your concern. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough, but I’m only looking at admin_level=2’s, i.e. countries. There are a few badly tagged ways/relations which aren’t really admin_level=2 (e.g. osm.org/way/259259040 ).

ATM I’m just messaging the people who mapped those things.

Cool. I’m helping to map and process some of the Irish historic boundaries at townlands.ie