It did look like a lot of new contributors were troublesome. A few cases did deserve closer inspection before deciding if they ware harmful not. You’re approach would get less negative reactions if you wait to be sure about all of them, and then turn it into an anonymous statistic. (Maybe names on request for people who doubt your judgement)

I do believe something should be done, as most reactions to your post did agree (even mine, disappointing you may have found my warning about dangerous ground any solution would have to thread). Be it a social or a technical solution or both. It would do most good for your cause if you consider the people who reacted as possible allies, and try to forge a small working group out of us to propose possible solutions to the people who might implement them.

When it comes to osm.org, it could be more of a hub. Not all services should be there, but it would do more good for the project with more prominent presence of the forum, the wiki, a selection of popular apps and services.

I agree that it would be great if iD would give warnings if you do weird stuff. It might be a good idea to have a system whereby a first edit goes through instant validation by a real person. In fact, it would be great if a live chat were built into iD so new contributors can have live guiding as they go. I’ve been dreaming about a system where experienced users can “adopt” newbies, giving them personal feedback and pointers. And then of course have some statistics by Pascal Neis about how your adoptees are doing as compared to other people’s adoptees.

But the focus should really be on how to turn new contributors into recurrent contributors, not on how to avoid damage by them. I predict the next three reactions will mention how we most definitely -do not- want to be like Wikipedia. The best way to kill a project like this is to heighten the barrier to becoming a contributor.

BTW, when it comes to destroying relations: when fixing administrative boundaries, I noticed experienced users are at least as good in this as beginners are.

Nice! To get the rendering of your new work visible, it helps to refresh (shift+f5) the map view at zoom levels which are a bit out of date.

Graham, thanks for the heads up (and the kind words)! Link is fixed now.

Hola Diego, acabo de hacer la caretera Huari-Chacas. He hecho algunas rutas que no has puesto todavia. Ya estan los gpx publicos, y he pusto unos ‘notes’ con nombres de pueblos. Con tiempo voy a editar yo, pero si te animas!

I actually have such a vm running, but I don’t know how to extract a snapshot as a downloadable file. Still, I’m not sure a postgres database is the most interesting repository. Anyhow, I didn’t know anything about Linux and did get things to work with help from the maker of these tools. (I asked mostly stupid questions, in retrospect) If you get stuck somewhere, feel free to ask me for help!

Que bueno! Cuando tengo la oportunidad veré si puedo contribuir algo en el mapa gracias a esto. De todo modo, hay tan poco trazos GPS en La Paz que cada cosa nuevo es gran ayuda

Hace poco he puesto gran parte de la carretera de Chiclayo hacía Jaén y Tarapoto. Increíble que esto todavía faltaba! Estoy viajando Peru en el momento. Con Osmand ya he puesto como 30 gasolineras, y cuando pueda estoy subiendo gpx y arreglando cosas. Pues queda harto trabajo en el Peru.

Looks like I did the almost exact same trip in Morocco. Recntly discovered this tool to visualize GPX tracks on websites: http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/

Pretty cool, except that http://www.emplexity.eu/osm_track_on_map.php/?id=1667511 doens’t visualize osm.org/user/joost%20schouppe/traces/1667511 . So I must be doing it wrong.

Exactly, a map only looks empty when other parts don’t!