[Talk-us] Arm chair mapping challenges

James Mast rickmastfan67 at hotmail.com
Tue Aug 18 15:05:37 UTC 2015


Yeah, I've had some problem edits from the MapBox paid editors as well not paying attention and believing that the Tiger data and Bing is pretty much 'always right'.  They most of the time don't even check the history of ways before they edit and add back in stuff that another 'on-the-ground' mapper removed when a road was rerouted (and clearly mentioned this in the changeset comment).  Or even take 2 seconds to see that the new 'residential' road they just added w/ a name is obviously in the wrong place when there's another road already in the OSM database with the same name less than 500 yards away and the one they're adding is smack dab right in the middle of a parking lot.

Best thing to do here IMO, is to call them out the edit(s) in the changeset comment(s) area and tell them why it shouldn't have been done and hopefully they'll learn from this.  Since I think they are all from out of the USA (kinda wish they'd hire a few of us USA mappers from here on talk-us as well for QC who know highway standards here in the US/Canada), odds are they haven't seen some of these setups in their home country, which can also lead to some of the errors.  You could also maybe contact Arun Ganesh [1] [2] since he's supposedly in charge of them per their profiles about all of this.

-James

[1] - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapbox#Mapbox_Data_Team
[2] - https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/PlaneMad 

> From: tod at fitchdesign.com
> Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 07:27:15 -0700
> To: talk-us at openstreetmap.org
> Subject: [Talk-us] Arm chair mapping challenges
> 
> I live a few miles from the new Apple campus that is currently under construction, so I see change sets for that area in my Who Did It RSS feed.
> 
> The site is fenced off and the satellite imagery available for OSM is out of date so I can’t say exactly what the status is other than some of the new “spaceship” building is starting to appear over the top of the fence.
> 
> Some other mapper has updated the area to remove the old buildings and streets and marked the area as under construction. All of that seems correct from what I’ve read in the paper and what little I can see on the ground.
> 
> But it means the area differs from the Tiger data for the area.
> 
> And now I am seeing multiple change sets from mappers I don’t recognize as local re-instating the now missing features. For example: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/366208964#map=15/37.3338/-122.0097
> 
> A number of the “fixes” have a mention of http://osmlab.github.io/to-fix/?error=tigerdelta-named#/task/tigerdelta in their change set comments.
> 
> I don’t have a good solution to this. But it does indicate to me that automated challenges can actually make the map worse in areas where local mappers have correctly accounted for recent changes. At the very least, their ought to be a big click through dialog box on any challenge stating that satellite imagery may be out of date and if there are newer local changes, especially ones marking the area as under construction that the individual task/challenge should not be implemented.
> 
> On the other hand, if you are adding a road back and it is going through a building=construction maybe you are clueless enough that a big click-through warning would not help.
> 
> Cheers,
> Tod
> 
> 
> 
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