[Talk-us] a reminder for armchair mappers

[Richard Welty]

if you see a discrepancy between aerial imagery and OSM, before you
go adding/changing stuff, check on the history of the stuff that's there
and see if another mapper has worked on things recently (for some
value of recently.) i have done a bunch of work in the past month
adding in a new traffic circle on US 4 in Rensselaer County, NY,
using GPS traces. as part of the process,  i removed a slip ramp
from I-90 that was taken out by DOT when they built the new
circle. i just now discovered that another mapper added the slip
ramp back in, presumably because it's in the Bing imagery, which
is at this point 2 or 3 years old.

this isn't the first time i've been through this; a year or so back
a couple of armchair mappers repeatedly changed a part of Troy
to match obsolete imagery and i kept having to ask them not to
and put back in the recent changes. i now put README tags on
the ways but if i delete something i have no place to put a
README tag.

imagery goes out of date. armchair mappers must never forget
that. if the imagery doesn't match the map, contact a local mapper
if you can identify one. you could be fixing something that wasn't
actually broken.

thanks,
   richard


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