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Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

high5apps.github.io

41–50 of 115 posts

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#41
post #28

One thing to note: OSM edits are associated with your account. Do not use your regular user name, or people can easily identify where you live since people tends to edit nearby locations. If you accidentally did that, I believe there's a way for the admin to scrub that for you.

There are much easier ways to identify the approximate neighborhood where most people live.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#42
post #10

Oh dear. Using JOSM for your 1st edit is definitely not recommended. Doing the same with iD (the editor embedded in the OSM website) is faster and there's even a tutorial that will explain a bit about how things work.

Yeah, I got as far as "Search for an Official Website". Didn't know what the hell I was looking at or for, and uninstalled JOSM.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#44
post #40

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.

It doesn't help that there are multiple ways to map sidewalks in OSM (as a property of the roads themselves, or as standalone paths parallel to the roads).

I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#45
post #10

Oh dear. Using JOSM for your 1st edit is definitely not recommended. Doing the same with iD (the editor embedded in the OSM website) is faster and there's even a tutorial that will explain a bit about how things work.

Tried to run JOSM, it tells me that "This app cannot run on this machine you have macOS 10.14.6 and it requires 10.11".

Just use the web page. It works, it's not hard to use and it's immediate when you have the urge and motivation to fix something on a map.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#46
post #23

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…

Every Door is definitely one of the easier ones and I like it but dang I wish the dev could get more funding to make it a nicer UX. Between the glitchy raster tiles and need to click load data all the time I feel it gets tiring fast. I've considered building a separate app that's similar but oriented around the idea of using voice of pictures to update things (with AI extracting and formatting the data for you to rev…

Isn’t that a door (haha) opened by our supreme new AI coding overlords: that now it’s possible to take the Every Door source code (it’s on Github), and throw it into a coding agent with the instruction to „improve without breaking functionality“, and with some iterations and human validation that yes, the UX is now indeed better, play the changes back with a PR?

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#47
post #10

Oh dear. Using JOSM for your 1st edit is definitely not recommended. Doing the same with iD (the editor embedded in the OSM website) is faster and there's even a tutorial that will explain a bit about how things work.

That's a fair point. I mainly chose JOSM for this tutorial because of its filter. As a beginner (just a few weeks ago), I couldn't figure out how to use iD's filter to show JOSM's equivalent of `name=* ((amenity=* "addr:housenumber"=*) | shop=*) -website=* -"contact:website"=*`. For this tutorial I wanted something better than than "click around the map until you find a place without a website." That felt like it'd b…

I think your tutorial would have more impact if you had a super short intro making a quick mod using the web page. The existing stuff is excellent for those who get a surge of dopamine from updating the map and want more power and control. The web editor is far from ideal but the app has a greater learning curve. Even installing it can be onerous.

I used the web editor recently to add a street and path and to fix some names. It was about as clunky as the Google Maps web editor which I used for the same updates.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#48
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't help that there are multiple ways to map sidewalks in OSM (as a property of the roads themselves, or as standalone paths parallel to the roads). I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many be…

There's usually a reasonably clear consensus within a region or country.

That's less true for niche stuff (vs stuff where two different ideas are in wide use), but there probably isn't all that much of it either.

One way to approach it is to not worry too much about it, consistency can come later.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#49
JOSM aside, I think it's great to target people that read HN with this article. They are likely tech savvy and as much as OSM tries to make it easy for less tech savvy folks to contribute, it's just not really feasible without third party apps like StreetComplete. I recently tried to teach my dad, who was interested but completely overwhelmed, even by the iD editor, and the whole idea of the data model. Which is a shame because he knows so much about the area where he lives.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#50
Contributing to OSM was super cool. I've had an issue where my home snaps to the nearest road, which is in fact fenced off from us, rather than the road that our cul de sac connects to (which was not well marked in OSM). Last week, I went in and in about ten minutes used the visual editor to paint in the driveway, read a quick wiki page on how to correctly label driveways, and then submitted it. I got a pleasant jump scare the next time I doordashed some food and saw the little driveway squiggles I added on the map in the doordash app, and then again for lyft -- such a cool feeling!

Would highly recommend the web editor -- what's proposed here looks super comprehensive but way more difficult to use for a first timer.

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