OpenStreetMap
As I’ve been mapping heavily since 2013, I’ve tried various ways to track my progress. It’s really great to feel that your mapping is making a visual and statistical difference! However, as of today, there is no good metric, and it’s very frustrating. Understandably, there is no way at all to measure actual quality or value of contribution across users, because it’s subjective, and users are very different from each other. However, for me, I know that I map at a consistent quality and node density, so I should at least be able to measure my progress with respect to myself! Here are things I’ve tried:
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Looking at my Heat Map. At first I thought, this is great! A clear visual indication of how much of the world I’ve contributed to, and a clear goal to cover the world! But, by 2014, I observed many edits weren’t counted, confirmed in an email exchange with it’s author, Pascal. To its credit, YOSMHM’s goal is only to give a rough idea of where a user has edited, and it does that very well. However, once you’ve edited for a while, you can add a thousand nodes and see nothing on the map change. That’s just frustrating.
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Looking at the “last modified” nodes and way on HDYC. This was great, I could do a busy night of editing and the next day, HDYC would show my “last modified” nodes went up by, for example, 10K nodes. It gave a good indication of how much I was contributing. Sadly, Pascal changed the website around November 2017 so it no longer shows “last modified”. That’s frustrating.
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Refreshing the map after doing major edits. This used to be possible by right-clicking the main OSM.org map’s tile and submitting it to the “dirty queue”, so it would be re-rendered and you can see all your work. This gave quick visual feedback and confirmation and an encouraging sense of accomplishment! Sadly, OSM.org changed how their map works (some blame OpenLayers?) so now you can’t get tile URLs and can’t request re-rendering, just wait for several days or more for the server to eventually re-render. That’s very sad.
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Looking at the #MissingMaps leaderboard you could see your “Total Edits”, “Buildings”, “Km of Road” numbers, and watch them go up in nearly real time! It used to be a little flaky (ignoring the occasional changeset, which was frustrating), but since December 2017, it now fails to count most changesets. I can submit, for example, 10 #MissingMaps changesets in a day and only see 1 of them counted, the rest ignored. That’s beyond frustrating.
In regards to #2 (HDYC), I did write a small C++ program (on my bitbucket) using Osmium to read the OSM Planet file and count the last-modified for each user. But, this is awkward, for several reasons:
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The planet file is huge (39 GB!), and I have yet to automate, so it’s a long slow manual download.
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The planet file is only updated once a week now. I have no idea how HDYC updates every day!
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I haven’t written the code yet to format the results into a nice, sortable web layout, or to integrate it with my existing spreadsheet of user notes.
So, that’s the state of things. All the ways that used to exist, to get visual or numerical feedback or progress metrics, are gone. In my opinion, it’s not just a personal frustration, but a lost opportunity for OSM as a movement, that we are missing this simple way for mappers to get encouragement and acknowledgement.
Discussion
Comment from Warin61 on 15 February 2018 at 07:18
Never tried to ‘track my progress’, never felt the need. Some of my edits I do for forthcoming trips, those I do want to have impact on the resulting map that I use. Some of my edits are to fix errors - those I don’t track other than checking that I have actually ‘fixed’ them. My encouragement is using the map for myself, improving the map for others and hearing and seeing others use the map. The map has been made by many hands, my contribution is small.
Comment from Hjart on 15 February 2018 at 09:16
I tend to be too busy mapping to really care about my stats :-)
Comment from spiregrain on 15 February 2018 at 14:12
You can still mark tiles as dirty if you can discover their URL. The new right-mouse menu on osm.org doesn’t prevent this, but it just make it more difficult.
In Firefox, you can find the URL for any displayed tile in the Page Info / Media panel. Then you can copy and paste it into a new tab with the “/dirty” appended.
Comment from nickjohnston on 15 February 2018 at 15:03
I suspect HDYC uses this daily feed of changes in osmChange format: http://planet.openstreetmap.org/replication/day/000/001/
I’m inclined to agree with the others who commented: I think your time could probably be better spent improving the map. For me, knowing that I’m positively contributing to a hugely useful resource is motivation enough. I’ve explored so many places thanks to OpenStreetMap and OsmAnd.
On the other hand, motivation is very individual, so if you need hard numbers to keep you going, then so be it :)
Thanks for all your contributions to OpenStreetMap–you’ve got many more than me!
Comment from Rovastar on 16 February 2018 at 09:11
About point 3. What level of zoom are you talking here?
Maybe it depends on where in the world you are at and what tile server you hit but I see the changes rapidly even on zoom like 15 about maybe 10 minutes with a few hard refreshes of the browser (Ctrl F5) but I’m in England. Never had to do the dirty tile thing.
Sometimes I have one tab open in the browser of an area before I do a large edit and the adjacent tab with the same location/Url with the refreshed map to compare.
If you want some more motivation try and get to the top of the (Nodes added + Nodes Modified - Nodes deleted) leaderboard. ;)
Comment from Heather Leson on 18 February 2018 at 15:53
Thanks for this.
When I consider beginner and intermediate mappers, it might be good to think about this workflow in terms of ‘validation’. Meaning - it would be good to have ‘mentors’ and feedback to know how we are mapping and how we can improve over time.
Comment from Viajero Perdido on 20 February 2018 at 22:42
Marking tiles dirty is a half-broken-down mess. Even with the tricks mentioned above (in Firefox, View Page Info, etc.), sometimes it works, sometimes not. Zoom levels 11 and 12 are in their own barely-functioning world, and they’ll update when they’re darn well ready. Something like two weeks. Yet I’ve just discovered I can /dirty zoom level 10 (!) and see results instantly, while 11 and 12 remain asleep as always.
That was my discovery yesterday, and suddenly I could see immediately what area I’d just worked on, and which to hit next. Today that stopped working. Argh!
Being able to see what you’ve just done - and by implication, what you can work on next - is a HUGE motivating factor.
When it works.
Comment from Warin61 on 20 February 2018 at 23:03
@ Viajero Perdido … patience.. The tile rendering takes time .. and your request is probably in a queue. Add the regular updates and the queue can be quite long. I usually wait a day. As there is a lot to do .. I simple move to another task/area and work on that.
Comment from SomeoneElse on 23 February 2018 at 10:35
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.
Comment from bdiscoe on 28 February 2018 at 05:13
@SomeoneElse, I took a look at the switch2osm page you mentioned, and 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 bigger problem, though, is that even if “install a tile rendering web server” was an easy 2-click thing that ordinary people could do, how would it get updated to reflect what’s on the OSM server in real time? The desired outcome is:
How, exactly, does having ones own map server help with that?
Comment from SomeoneElse on 28 February 2018 at 21:49
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!
In at least two specific ways:
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.
Comment from bdiscoe on 23 March 2018 at 23:36
Update! Today, after many months, the #MissingMaps leaderboard (http://www.missingmaps.org/leaderboards/#/missingmaps) is live again, and apparently accurate!