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Found it! It is lorries it is directing.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/31/uk-village-posts-ign.html

Also a general article here, showing a yellow temporary text-only sign:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-436983/First-ignore-sat-nav-roadsigns-up.html

I came across an official road sign in Wales telling drivers to ignore their sat nav and not turn off through a village. It even had a symbol of a satellite above a car. Wish I'd got a photo.

I too agree with chilly. Where the abandoned railway has been replaced by a road, the rendering is really busy and would leave a casual user of the map confused, e.g., here:

osm.org/?lat=53.39693&lon=-2.35824&zoom=16&layers=B000FTF

Thanks, RichardB. I now understand a little more of why he raised this point. The blog was about mapping in the Philippines. In fact, the point he seems to be making seems to be to do with understanding the particular inaccuracy of using GPS in the Philippines, so he may be right that it would be useful for someone to explain the issue in lay terms to local mappers, so they can be aware of it (though I think they have some hi-res aerial imagery anyway). It's just a shame he made the "kiddy" comment. I think that kind of approach is always just going to switch people off.

I lurve the follow up comment from the same commentator:

"Its nice to learn that you indeed have mapping professionals in your group. I also suggest that you need to at least discuss within the group the implications of Executive Order No. 45 or the PPCS-TM/PRS92 as a WGS84 variant. Good luck."

At first glance this would seem to support Steeley's viewpoint! (But maybe a well-informed reader who knows what the hell it means might explain how important it really is?)

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I can see HannesHH's point regarding the students agreeing with the licence. But what possible privacy concerns could there be? It is not as if they are uploading traces of their own houses. Firstly, surely it is likely that all of these traces will be uploaded from a single OSM account, not identifying individuals, and secondly individuals who do upload tracks personally can upload them as private tracks. Please explain.

If your seven postcodes were collected from non-copyright sources (and definitely not from doing searches on the Royal Mail DB!), why not add them to one of the slightly (!) larger free databases:

http://www.npemap.org.uk/

45,000 and counting... mark them on out-of-copyright maps.

If you collected these seven postcodes using a GPS, you could also add them here:

http://www.freethepostcode.org/

Never really looked at this one, but it also includes addresses:

http://postcodedb.sourceforge.net/

And, of course, you could add them to OpenStreetMap!

Kevin, I'm sure you're right. I was just answering seav's point that you can't fit elevation data easily into OSM - you could fit it in, if you could collect it accurately. Thanks for pointing out the accuracy issue, though. I've put the odd ele point in when I feel like it (which is very rarely), and I might reconsider doing so, without reading up a bit more and possibly testing my device!

Elevation can be mapped as points, using the "ele" tag. Countour lines are a rendering issue. Is there any other DEM data that could not recorded using the "ele" tag? (This is a genuine question - I know absoutely nothing about DEM.)

You will find differences between Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. OSM is work in progress, so there will be some areas that are not mapped at all, and some areas that are not completely mapped. On the other hand, you will find some areas which are mapped in detail (footpaths, parks, points of interest, etc.) in OSM, which only have roads mapped in GM.

There are also instances of errors in Google Maps where streets that don't exist have been mapped, or the wrong street name has been applied. Whilst Google Maps coverage is good in North America and Europe, there are many countries elsewhere GM does not cover well. Errors and omissions exist in both maps.

What kind of differences are you finding? And what country are you looking in?

By the way, anyone can help missing features to OpenStreetMap. If you would like to help, see the Beginners Guide:

osm.wiki/Beginners%27_Guide

I think (though please correct me if I'm wrong), it is referring to the conversation that has arisen out of Kevin's previous diary post:

osm.org/user/Kevin%20Steinhardt/diary/8271

I have obviously caused offence, and that was not my intention, so apologies for that. I certainly have no intention of having a row. I was simply providing some examples of what I was concerned about.

I am glad your edits to road name are based on reliable non-copyright sources. I was not trying to suggest they were not. I asked the question simply because it can be tempting to assume that when a road, with a missing name tag, appears to be a spur of another road that it has the same name, which is not always the case. I am glad that is not the case here.

I am not sure what you mean by a fault in this context. Along with many, many mappers (including those who have made a much bigger contribution than my piddling efforts), I do not regard Map Features as exhaustive, nor necessarily as prescriptive. However, even putting that aside, the "sport" tag I referred to is documented there. The only issue I could see with the particular instance I referred to was using commas instead of semi-colons to delimit the values. So, if you want to clean up the data, why not just change them to semi-colons instead of deleting the whole tag and losing the information someone has gone to the effort of collecting?

I am not trying to belittle your efforts to improve the map or the data. I welcome all genuine efforts to make OSM better, including yours. I just don't want anyone else's efforts to go to waste (unless there is a really good reason).

I am concerned about this so-called "de-linting". You seem to be removing useful information other mappers have recorded. For example, here you have removed the "sport" tag, listing the sports that take place at a sports_centre:

osm.org/browse/way/4196931/history

The Maplint layer is supposed to be a tool for spotting _potential_ problems. The map will never be "lint-free".

By all means tidy up, but please do not remove information from the map, that other mappers have worked hard to collect, and may be of use to someone.

Also, where you are adding road names to roads that look like spurs (not sure if that is the right term here) to residential roads, are you actually surveying these on the ground? It is not uncommon for such roads to have different names to the roads they feed off, and it may simply be that the original mapper had a road name missing from their notes and did not get round to resurveying, so entering the same name as the road they feed off may be wrong, unless you check the situation on the ground. For example:

osm.org/browse/way/3875464/history