There is also currently no easy obvious way of monitoring new users who don't post diary entries. These users can spam from their user pages without being noticed. There is also no easy way of flagging such a user as spam.

spam

What about mercurial?

spam

I only add urban footways and cycleways when they actually go somewhere useful, like a footway cut-through between roads which could potentially save a pedestrian user hundreds of meters on their journey.

If you map the sidewalk next to a road, the routing will just not work. It won't know that you can cross the road at any point. As a result it will send you on some strange detour to a node that happens to be connected across a road just to get to the other side. And if the footway isn't well connected, you may find some segments totally unroutable.

And it almost always looks a mess in the rendering.

So I would say no.

Oh.

You should probably read osm.wiki/Wikipedia#Importing_geodata_from_Wikipedia

I am convinced that in the long term, allowing Google to hijack OSM's community (and data) would be a serious detriment to future 'life saving' relief operations.

If it weren't for OSM's existence I can bet you anything Google would not be offering any way of getting vector data from it. In fact I seriously doubt MapMaker would exist at all.

It would be naive of anyone to believe that both sides haven't been using the Haiti work as a means to publicize their platform. At least OSM is using it to further their project, whereas Google is using it to recruit serfs. I'm also not sure about the notion of aiming for publicity is an unsavoury trait. Publicity is not an end in itself. Personally, what puts a smile on my face is having people make use of my work. The more people know about it, the more it gets used.

I don't see how a PD fork would prevent parallel work. Google would not supply us with data in return. We would not be able to incorporate their improvements. We would continue mapping in OSM. It would just be a one way gift to Google.

I also think that at this stage, the merging of the two datasets would be more work than either community could achieve.

I personally have no interest in feeding Google's proprietary data store.

Most phones with inbuilt GPSs perform rather poorly because they have tiny GPS antennas.

As it's not primarily a GPS device, the engineers can't really justify the space a good GPS antenna would take up.

Great work!

I know what you mean with 'ugh', but it's actually really satisfying when you can pinpoint any house number in your neighborhood.

Skippern: I more often see it written rtl.

This is really great.

One of those things that had never even crossed my mind.

This is presumably why google want to trick people into doing their work for them with mapmaker.

Welcome! Congratulations!

We all look forward to seeing more of your contributions.

I wouldn't say it's a no-no, many of us use it all the time, but it takes some setting up in a style those of us with unix backgrounds find normal.

Skippern: This is because Yahoo uses a different mechanism from the other imagery. The license stipulates that the imagery must be obtained through yahoo's javascript API, so we have to do a little bit of proxying magick to get it to show up in an application which doesn't do js.

Yes it's a pity about the JOSM/yahoo thing. Complex data license matter.

You might have better luck with merkaartor, which has an internal version of webkit for the yahoo imagery.

Thanks for the link. It gave me a good giggle.

Perhaps he should look at that example of the wonders of Professional Mapping that is TIGER before he makes blanket statements about "QA" of "Pro" vs. "Amateur" mapping.

According to Mikel Maron, you can probably buy derivation rights to the pro aerial photography for $12 per sq km.

Recently a few people did try doing their own photos over stratford-upon-avon by buying a sightseeing trip. The real issue ended up being the rectification and stitching of the photos. It still hasn't been done properly.