How should collapsed/damaged bridges be tagged?

Hi delta82,
welcome to OSM. It looks like Salvador has high-resolution aerial photos from Yahoo available. Most editors allow you to select the yahoo aerials as background to draw over it, so that should help a lot with the lagoon as well as roads, buildings, landuse etc.

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Searching for "خريطة الطريق المفتوحة" now finds Ar:MainPage on the first page of results, so apparently that page has been scanned again. The OSM start page as well as the wiki Ar:MainPage are now both found when searching for "خرائط", but unfortunately not on the first 50 pages of results. That is caused by not many other web sites linking there, so if you have a chance to do so, please write articles about OSM for your local computer club, university group, newspaper or other interested websites; not only will the readers of your article learn about OSM, but also the OSM website will move to better places in the result lists when your article has a link to OSM and/or the OSM wiki.

@Hjart: So apparently renderers work around it nowadays. I'ld suggest to don't do it anyways, because the definition of layer -1 is "below natural ground level". For a description ans discussion of the layer tag, see osm.wiki/Key:layer and the associated discussion page.

layer -1 is supposed to mean "underground". A stream tagged as layer -1 is not rendered in areas where landuse is defined, as far as I remember. So its better not to do that.

Searching for خريطة now finds Ar:MainPage, so declaring the language used for the wiki content appears to help. I also added a language declaration to Ar:Map_Features, but the introduction text on that page is as yet untranslated and my knowledge of arabic is not good enough to translate it myself. It would be good if someone could translate that text segment.

Wikipedia has independent websites for each language, so they can localize the wiki framework itself. OSM wiki shares one framework for all language versions, that makes this kind of thing a lot more difficult. I have added a lang="ar" to the main content on Ar:MainPage; lets wait a day or two and look if it makes a difference.

After getting a bit of sleep, I've had a closer look. A possible problem is that we don't tell Google which language the localized pages use; as there are many languages using arabic script this might prevent them from using language specific search functions. I'll try and add lang parameters to Ar:MainPage to see if it makes a difference.

For the readers that don't speak Arabic: خريطة means "map" while الخريطة means "the map". In english both searches would supposedly return the same result (actually a few more results for "map" without "the") but they return very different results in arabic; it looks like Google treats both as totally different words.

Actually, they do index the pages, just not very good. Your blog post is now found. Their indexer does apparently not know much about arabic; try searching for خريطة on the site and compare the result with a search for الخريطة
There seem to be a few more bugs in addition to that one though; even the second search does not find e.g. osm.wiki/Ar:Tag:shop%3Dbakery

If the "climategate" files are what I think they are, we are talking about data stolen and then published by criminals. I don't think we can add that data.

Please keep in mind that Google Maps, Satellite photos and StreetView are copyrighted material, so it is not ok to add ways based on that information only. Please visit in person or use a source that allows tracing for OSM like Yahoo aerial imagery

According to the wiki page linked by HannesHH, some entries in the geonames.org database are based on Google Maps and so can not be imported for legal reasons. So what we should do is, to identify those entries that are based on GNS, update the source tags etc. to point to the GNS entries and remove those entries that are NOT based on GNS (unless we can identify they are based on another source that we don't have legal problems importing; in this case we should also update the source tags for those).

Do you think it would be possible to re-source those of the uploaded records to GNS that came from there originally with a simple script, so we can get an "untainted" import without loosing much of the data?

For at least a large part of the imported data, like springs, peaks and other natural phenomena, I can't see how these could be derived from google maps as this kind of data is not available there (or at least I failed to find it there).
Maybe that data is derived from the Geonet Names Server? Might be a good idea to check how much of the imported data is also available on GNS.

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Der bremeninsider versucht einfach sein Google Ranking hochzutreiben, weil er ja jetzt einen Link von OSM hat. Die Community ist ihm sehr wahrscheinlich komplett egal. Es ist also
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