[OSM-talk] Beware Pokemon users

[moltonel 3x Combo]

For what it's worth, I tested the hypothesis that Go uses OSM by
walking http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/142843552. It's a
highway=footway inside a leisure=park, which I added in OSM years ago
and still isn't in Google, Bing, ESRI, or HERE (they do have the rest
of the town mapped). This town is generally pretty boring to play Go:
no gym, 3 stops very far apart, and rather few spawns. I've been
playing Go regularly for a few months, here and in a much more
Go-friendly town.

While this is only an anecdotal result, there are clearly a lot more
spawns on this walk than in the surrounding area (I regularly get
10-15 spawns on this 700m footway, but only 1-2 covering the same
distance along the primary to get there).

IMHO, the biggest news here is that (a subsidiary of) Google is using
OSM data in a high-profile product. If this is true, this is a very
big "switch2osm" story and it'd be great PR for OSM. I encourage other
OSMers to test suitable areas. If the OSM community (which is IMHO
better suited at asserting this than the Go community) can gain enough
confidence that Go is indeed using OSM data, a friendly and public
request from the OSMF to get OSM credited in Go would be in order.


Concerning the fear that Go players will deteriorate the OSM data to
suit their Go needs, I'm not too worried. Being aware of potential bad
edits is good, but we've dealt with problematic user groups before
(bitcoin shops for example).

Having more OSM contributors is always good, but contributors coming
from the Go community would be particularly so, because it is has
demographic that differ from the OSM average (most notably by being
63% women), and OSM sorely needs more contributor diversity.