[OSM-talk] New Mapfeatures (Views) on openstreetmap.org: Proposal for additional

[Richard Weait]

Indeed, Alexander,as nebulon says, adding or changing the features is complicated.

Some layers shown on OSM.org are from third party providers. 

The cartographer responsible for each rendering will have very strong opinions on what they have selected and why.  Your opinions may differ.  In fact the opinion of every other cartographer is likely to differ. :-)

The most successful way to get a change that you support into a rendering is to either

1 do it yourself by making your own version of the existing rendering,or creating one from a clean slate.  You don't need permission, and you may publish your own tiles in your own style, as permitted by the open licenses of the data and software.  Your version might become more popular than the other.

2 make your own version in the form of a patch to an existing rendering. Do all of the work to get it right. Even better if you can benchmark your changes to show that they don't create performance issues.  Then offer the patch to the maintainer of the existing rendering.  This still might not work, again, they may have considered the thing you want,and may have rejected it long ago for their own reasons.

3 join up with others who are like minded and do one or the other above,or a combination of both.  There are many different renderings of OpenStreetMap data, and that is a wonderful diversity.  No single rendering can ever hope to satisfy every use case. 

4 you might have happened onto an idea that is on the wish list of the maintainer of the existing rendering.  So ask if they would like help to implement your idea in a way that also meets their thoughts.  It could be that they had no time to implement what you seek, but would consider including it.