[OSM-talk] OSM on The Reg

[Someoneelse]

I had a look at Google Mapmaker as well (I'd not used it before either). 
  Frankly, it seems a bit pants:

When trying to use it it asked me to "Please zoom in to browse features 
in the current map view" but on the same screen said "We are sorry, but 
we don't have maps at this zoom level for this region.  Try zooming out 
for a broader look".  Clearly something is wrong, but from reading the 
screen I've no idea what.

The two strange buttons below the "browse" text on the map don't seem to 
do anything - presumably nothing has been added locally or I'm not 
allowed to edit here for some reason?  There's an on-screen link that 
says "160+ countries editable in Google Map Maker" which goes to a page 
which lists about 100 (but not the UK or US), but DOES list them on a 
slippy map above?  Attempting to outline a feature (Pride Park in Derby, 
England, FWIW) gives a "failed to create feature" error and a search of 
the site for that text offers no help.

I presume what's happening is that they're using Google Mapmaker where 
they know that their existing maps are a bit rubbish - a quick check of 
Bulawayo suggests that that might be the case.  That certainly seemed to 
have more roads and features than the OSM map of Bulawayo did - or at 
least it did until the browser page froze with a "loading..." message.

Maybe something more akin to "openstreetbugs plus a simple guided way to 
add one feature at a time" should be integrated into OSM, but I wouldn't 
use GMM as an example except of what not to do!