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Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

high5apps.github.io

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Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#31

Post by Freak_NL »

KolmogorovComp wrote: post #3

> Do NOT use search results for social media profiles This seems a bit outdated as many restaurants/shops now consider they FB/insta page as their "official" website (or rather lack of).

It's a dumb thing to do too. If you have a website, you control what it says. For a shop or restaurant it's totally fine to just show a nice photo with your name, opening hours, address, and contact details, and just link to whatever social media accounts and reservation/delivery ordering platform you use.

It's also the place that will allow you to inform your patrons when big tech deletes your heavily invested in social media account for some reason.

Not having a normal website means that potential customers who search for you get hit by login-walls for Instagram and Facebook if they're not on it, or 'you need an app for this' with crap like TikTok. It also makes my (volunteer) job of mapping the area around me harder, because I'm most certainly not going to bother to enter any additional info about your business if I have to go to Instagram or Facebook (and in the OpenStreetMap community I'm not alone in that).

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#34

Post by jmkb »

corecoder wrote: post #2

Boy, the UX is horrible! > The area you tried to downlaod is too big or your request was too large. And no indication whatsoever of how big the area should be, I'm at my fifth attempt so far.

The limit is imposed by the OSM API itself, and it's a matter of how much data is already mapped in the area you're requesting -- a max of 50,000 nodes according the API docs. Of course data density varies wildly across the planet, so you can expect to fetch a lot more acreage in rural areas than in urban ones. But there's no way to know if a particular bounding box call will succeed without trying it out.

Editing software could be generally aware of high and low density locales and advise accordingly. And it could subdivide a large request into smaller ones. But the JOSM developers prefer to offer a closer-to-the-API experience.

[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6#Retrieving_map_...

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#35

Post by mayneack »

doctoboggan wrote: post #18

I recently purchased some very rural land with a cabin that I put on AirBnB. The address is a different road than the driveway is and all the maps took drivers around 1 mile away with no way to find the actual driveway. I had to go through the process of fixing this on Google, Apple, and open street maps. OSM was by far the easiest and my updates propagated within minutes. Google was the second easiest but still took…

Another option for apple would have been to just wait for a few months. They are downstream of osm but updates are slow. Likely your "propagated within minutes" was misleading. Almost no app, certainly not a mainstream app your customers might use, is reading osm live. They're all days to months behind on periodic batch updates.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#36

Post by celsoazevedo »

This seems to be a very powerful way to contribute to OpenStreetMap, but I'm not sure if it's the right option for a new user.

I have over 2k contributions and most are from the Every Door app ( https://every-door.app/ ) on my phone.

If adding new data is too "scary", then maybe use StreetComplete ( https://streetcomplete.app/ ) which essentially asks questions about missing or existing old data.

I've added buildings, fixed layouts, etc, but that came later, after I better understood how things work.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#40

Post by nradov »

_russross wrote: post #13

I started contributing to OSM recently after a bike trail was built near me. The arial imagery typically takes years to refresh around here so I walked it a few times to capture GPX tracks and then drew the new path. It was exciting to see my contribution percolate out to various apps that depend on OSM, and meanwhile Google and Apple have both ignored my edit suggestions and deny the path exists. So I have a fairly…

In a lot of areas the sidewalks and crosswalks aren't mapped even though they show up clearly on overhead imagery. I try to fill them in when I can, although this should probably be an AI task now.
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