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OpenStreetMap May be in Serious Trouble

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

islisis writes:

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 isj on Wednesday February 21 2018, @07:32PM

    by isj (5249) on Wednesday February 21 2018, @07:32PM (#641346) Homepage

    There is definitely some weirdness in google maps. I am/was a google maps contributor.

    One day I noticed that the street address of where I used to work had moved 2km. Not the building but the actual address. It seemed that some unrelated business had randomly moved the address' physical location. And there was no way for me to correct it. And no way to unapprove the change. An no clear way to find out who the incompetent approver was or where to report it.

    Another time I saw that new street addresses had popped up on a bare field nearby, and one old address had moved there too. No signs of what had happened in revision history. Any no way to correct it.

    Yeah, footpaths are generally not that great in google maps, even though I know the source data has it (gst.dk). My favorite example was once I found a one-way sidewalk. Turns out that google maps ties the sidewalk to the associated road, and when one diretion on the road is closed for roadwork it affects the sidewalk too (incorrectly).

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