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posted by martyb on Wednesday February 21 2018, @01:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the uncharted-territory dept.

Serge Wroclawski, a long-time contributor to OpenStreetMap, has posted a criticism of the management choices he believes are preventing the OpenStreetMap Foundation from fulfilling its mission (much like the Wikimedia Foundation):

I feel the OpenStreetMap project is currently unable to fulfill that mission due to poor technical decisions, poor political decisions, and a general malaise in the project. I'm going to outline in this article what I think OpenStreetMap has gotten wrong. It's entirely possible that OSM will reform and address the impediments to its success- and I hope it does. We need a Free as in Freedom geographic dataset.


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  • (Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Wednesday February 21 2018, @07:12PM (2 children)

    by The Archon V2.0 (3887) on Wednesday February 21 2018, @07:12PM (#641328)

    > Wikipedia-sarcasm aside, does OpenStreetMap also operate like that?

    No idea, though I hope not. I think we've just devolved into taking shots at Wikipedia. (Not that it hasn't earned 'em, mind.)

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday February 21 2018, @10:09PM (1 child)

    by nitehawk214 (1304) on Wednesday February 21 2018, @10:09PM (#641434)

    I have made several edits to OSM, addressing one way street, footpath, and signage changes that have occurred in recent years, and are newer than the source data.

    Even before my edits, OSM was more accurate in this neighborhood than Google Maps. Both are probably close enough for navigation purposes (Assuming people are smart enough to not turn on to a signed one way street), but sometimes Google Maps don't even match with the reality of the satellite maps.

    I have never had reverts to any edits, as my edits are always ones that I have physically visited. I suspect that nobody else that edits OSM has visited some of the areas I have edited, so they get left alone. Most of them had no edits since the original base data. There were several small parks and footpaths that were not on the map, and several roads that have not existed for 20+ years.

    When editing OSM it has a "source" field, which you can set to "local knowledge".

    I do see some people on OSM will edit areas that they have probably not visited. It looks like they changed the map to reflect the satellite maps. But any of those changes that have happened in areas I have visited look accurate.

    Another interesting thing is that my edits appear immediately on the live map, with no (apparent) review process. Maybe it is because all of my edits have been fairly minor and constrained to a single street or intersection. I don't follow the reddit, but I know they have had people look at the imagery to check how accurate some maps are.

    --
    "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @10:08AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @10:08AM (#641733)

      Lack of review is one of the problems mentioned.