I started contributing to OSM recently after a bike trail was built near me. The arial imagery typically takes years to refresh around here so I walked it a few times to capture GPX tracks and then drew the new path. It was exciting to see my contribution percolate out to various apps that depend on OSM, and meanwhile Google and Apple have both ignored my edit suggestions and deny the path exists.
So I have a fairly fresh newcomer's perspective and here's what I suggest to get started: keep it simple and start local. As others have noted, skip the complex mapping app and go straight to the website for feature edits, or download a simple mobile app like Every Door and focus on businesses and landmarks near you. Go on a walk around your neighborhood and look for old/incorrect/missing businesses. There may be errors near you about places you actually care about, and it is really gratifying to fix those.
There were restaurants near me that were missing, shops that had changed hands, etc., that were easy fixes but years overdue. I captured some basics (names, posted hours, the phone number posted on the door, etc.) with Every Door, and then later logged into the main OSM website and fine-tuned the entries. I got into a pattern of fixing one or two entries every evening when I went out for a walk and pretty soon my walking route was all up-to-date. Then I started paying attention to things like stop signs and cross walks and found a whole new kind of little, incremental edits that nobody else was doing.
It's been fun, I've made useful contributions, and my laptop is still Java free.
Every Door is definitely one of the easier ones and I like it but dang I wish the dev could get more funding to make it a nicer UX. Between the glitchy raster tiles and need to click load data all the time I feel it gets tiring fast.
I've considered building a separate app that's similar but oriented around the idea of using voice of pictures to update things (with AI extracting and formatting the data for you to review). But alas making yet another tool isnt ideal.
One thing to note: OSM edits are associated with your account. Do not use your regular user name, or people would be easily identify where you live since people tends to edit nearby locations.
If you accidentally did that, I believe there's a way for the admin to scrub that for you.
I mainly chose JOSM for this tutorial because of its filter. As a beginner (just a few weeks ago), I couldn't figure out how to use iD's filter to show JOSM's equivalent of `name=* ((amenity=* "addr:housenumber"=*) | shop=*) -website=* -"contact:website"=*`. For this tutorial I wanted something better than than "click around the map until you find a place without a website." That felt like it'd be a frustrating and inefficient first experience.
JOSM is great when you get really into, but if it's really your first edit, just use the editor on openstreetmap.org.
If it's something you end up enjoying, one really satisfying thing to do is pick a small rural town and improve the map. With a few hours, it's not hard to make the OSM data more detailed and better than any other publicly available map.
I've been using the app "StreetComplete" on Android, I have found it to be a really seamless and easy way to add extra details to OpenStreetMap while roaming around.
I recently purchased some very rural land with a cabin that I put on AirBnB. The address is a different road than the driveway is and all the maps took drivers around 1 mile away with no way to find the actual driveway. I had to go through the process of fixing this on Google, Apple, and open street maps. OSM was by far the easiest and my updates propagated within minutes. Google was the second easiest but still took me deep into the “feedback” menu and then a week or two of waiting. Apple was by far the worst as I had to sign up for an Apple business account, upload incorporation docs, and then go through multiple rounds of back and forth with some approval agent.
I appreciate this a lot, but I wonder why the first edit is not done on the website itself. This is 15 minutes of work for a single change, while on the website you can do it in a minute.
How does OSM prevent trolling or vandalism? Since many (most) courier companies rely on OSM for their database a bad "joke" could prove very frustrating to many people.
Just like Wikipedia, people follow changes. If there is vandalism, it often gets reverted within a few hours. If there's a mistake (relation broken for example) it can take a few hours longer to fix.
I once encountered a joke building that was so large, I remember in the magnitude of 500km2, that you couldn’t edit it in the web editor. You had to download a desktop application to delete it.
It was in a place of the world that is unlikely to be popular within the OSM community.
As a beginner use the editor built in on the website instead (called ID). JOSM is a great power user tool, but this article's recommendation to use it for your first edit is misguided.
I think the complaint is focused on the notion that the instructions tell a would-be contributor what is not OK, and then do not help them to figure out what is OK.
> Determine if any of the search results represent the official website for your place. Do NOT use search results for social media profiles, review sites, or other business aggregators. When in doubt, don’t use it.
This zero-option style phrasing doesn't leave any room for interpretation.
Funny enough, Cafe Lolo, the business that the example edit demonstrates, replaced my favorite restaurant in Seattle, Cookweaver. The chef-owner of Cookweaver is now doing private events and in-home meals for folks who miss his cooking: https://www.cookweaver.com/omakase-menu
Is there any software that can take raw footage from 360deg cameras that are now sprolling, identify businesses without websites, opening hours etc, and pre-fill them? With the user only having to validate.
You can actually add a "streetview" level to the editor by adding the mapillary plugin and you can add material for others on the free and independent version: https://panoramax.fr/
I started contributing to OSM recently after a bike trail was built near me. The arial imagery typically takes years to refresh around here so I walked it a few times to capture GPX tracks and then drew the new path. It was exciting to see my contribution percolate out to various apps that depend on OSM, and meanwhile Google and Apple have both ignored my edit suggestions and deny the path exists.
So I have a fairly fresh newcomer's perspective and here's what I suggest to get started: keep it simple and start local. As others have noted, skip the complex mapping app and go straight to the website for feature edits, or download a simple mobile app like Every Door and focus on businesses and landmarks near you. Go on a walk around your neighborhood and look for old/incorrect/missing businesses. There may be errors near you about places you actually care about, and it is really gratifying to fix those.
There were restaurants near me that were missing, shops that had changed hands, etc., that were easy fixes but years overdue. I captured some basics (names, posted hours, the phone number posted on the door, etc.) with Every Door, and then later logged into the main OSM website and fine-tuned the entries. I got into a pattern of fixing one or two entries every evening when I went out for a walk and pretty soon my walking route was all up-to-date. Then I started paying attention to things like stop signs and cross walks and found a whole new kind of little, incremental edits that nobody else was doing.
It's been fun, I've made useful contributions, and my laptop is still Java free.
Every Door is definitely one of the easier ones and I like it but dang I wish the dev could get more funding to make it a nicer UX. Between the glitchy raster tiles and need to click load data all the time I feel it gets tiring fast.
I've considered building a separate app that's similar but oriented around the idea of using voice of pictures to update things (with AI extracting and formatting the data for you to review). But alas making yet another tool isnt ideal.
One thing to note: OSM edits are associated with your account. Do not use your regular user name, or people would be easily identify where you live since people tends to edit nearby locations.
If you accidentally did that, I believe there's a way for the admin to scrub that for you.
Oh dear.
Using JOSM for your 1st edit is definitely not recommended.
Doing the same with iD (the editor embedded in the OSM website) is faster and there's even a tutorial that will explain a bit about how things work.
That's a fair point.
I mainly chose JOSM for this tutorial because of its filter. As a beginner (just a few weeks ago), I couldn't figure out how to use iD's filter to show JOSM's equivalent of `name=* ((amenity=* "addr:housenumber"=*) | shop=*) -website=* -"contact:website"=*`. For this tutorial I wanted something better than than "click around the map until you find a place without a website." That felt like it'd be a frustrating and inefficient first experience.
Is there a way to make that filter in iD?
JOSM is great when you get really into, but if it's really your first edit, just use the editor on openstreetmap.org.
If it's something you end up enjoying, one really satisfying thing to do is pick a small rural town and improve the map. With a few hours, it's not hard to make the OSM data more detailed and better than any other publicly available map.
I've been using the app "StreetComplete" on Android, I have found it to be a really seamless and easy way to add extra details to OpenStreetMap while roaming around.
I recently purchased some very rural land with a cabin that I put on AirBnB. The address is a different road than the driveway is and all the maps took drivers around 1 mile away with no way to find the actual driveway. I had to go through the process of fixing this on Google, Apple, and open street maps. OSM was by far the easiest and my updates propagated within minutes. Google was the second easiest but still took me deep into the “feedback” menu and then a week or two of waiting. Apple was by far the worst as I had to sign up for an Apple business account, upload incorporation docs, and then go through multiple rounds of back and forth with some approval agent.
I appreciate this a lot, but I wonder why the first edit is not done on the website itself. This is 15 minutes of work for a single change, while on the website you can do it in a minute.
How does OSM prevent trolling or vandalism? Since many (most) courier companies rely on OSM for their database a bad "joke" could prove very frustrating to many people.
Just like Wikipedia, people follow changes. If there is vandalism, it often gets reverted within a few hours. If there's a mistake (relation broken for example) it can take a few hours longer to fix.
I once encountered a joke building that was so large, I remember in the magnitude of 500km2, that you couldn’t edit it in the web editor. You had to download a desktop application to delete it.
It was in a place of the world that is unlikely to be popular within the OSM community.
The main method of prevention is blocks on users that make malicious edits. Obviously that doesn't prevent all malicious edits.
The larger users of the data are doing some degree of validation of changes before showing them to users.
Boy, the UX is horrible!
> The area you tried to downlaod is too big or your request was too large.
And no indication whatsoever of how big the area should be, I'm at my fifth attempt so far.
As a beginner use the editor built in on the website instead (called ID). JOSM is a great power user tool, but this article's recommendation to use it for your first edit is misguided.
It's actually OK compared to your typical GIS desktop app, but naturally not the thing to recommend a beginner.
Sorry you're having such a frustrating first experience. I'd recommend trying just 1-3 city blocks max
> Do NOT use search results for social media profiles
This seems a bit outdated as many restaurants/shops now consider they FB/insta page as their "official" website (or rather lack of).
For social media profiles, a different tag like contact:facebook, contact:instagram, etc. are recommended!
[1] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/contact:facebook [2] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/contact:instagram
I think the complaint is focused on the notion that the instructions tell a would-be contributor what is not OK, and then do not help them to figure out what is OK.
> Determine if any of the search results represent the official website for your place. Do NOT use search results for social media profiles, review sites, or other business aggregators. When in doubt, don’t use it.
This zero-option style phrasing doesn't leave any room for interpretation.
Thanks, I feel the article should have said that
There's separate tags for the social media profiles. So those can still be added.
Funny enough, Cafe Lolo, the business that the example edit demonstrates, replaced my favorite restaurant in Seattle, Cookweaver. The chef-owner of Cookweaver is now doing private events and in-home meals for folks who miss his cooking: https://www.cookweaver.com/omakase-menu
Is there any software that can take raw footage from 360deg cameras that are now sprolling, identify businesses without websites, opening hours etc, and pre-fill them? With the user only having to validate.
A foot-carried google street car if you want.
You can actually add a "streetview" level to the editor by adding the mapillary plugin and you can add material for others on the free and independent version: https://panoramax.fr/
mapillary got bought up by meta.
Don't make your first edit(s) around the place you live.
I would honestly not recommend beginners use JOSM - the web based iD editor [1] is much easier to learn and will hold your hand a lot more.
[1]: https://learnosm.org/en/beginner/id-editor/