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.
I was put off by co tributing to osm at first when someone brought up that 300mb java monster application at first actually. Luckily i found there's an online editor and did my first edits there. I would definitely not recommend josm for a newcommer
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 limit is imposed by the OSM API itself, and it's a matter of how much data is already mapped in the area you're requesting -- a max of 50,000 nodes according the API docs. Of course data density varies wildly across the planet, so you can expect to fetch a lot more acreage in rural areas than in urban ones. But there's no way to know if a particular bounding box call will succeed without trying it out.
Editing software could be generally aware of high and low density locales and advise accordingly. And it could subdivide a large request into smaller ones. But the JOSM developers prefer to offer a closer-to-the-API experience.
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 a dumb thing to do too. If you have a website, you control what it says. For a shop or restaurant it's totally fine to just show a nice photo with your name, opening hours, address, and contact details, and just link to whatever social media accounts and reservation/delivery ordering platform you use.
It's also the place that will allow you to inform your patrons when big tech deletes your heavily invested in social media account for some reason.
Not having a normal website means that potential customers who search for you get hit by login-walls for Instagram and Facebook if they're not on it, or 'you need an app for this' with crap like TikTok. It also makes my (volunteer) job of mapping the area around me harder, because I'm most certainly not going to bother to enter any additional info about your business if I have to go to Instagram or Facebook (and in the OpenStreetMap community I'm not alone in that).
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/
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.
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.
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.
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?
If you accidentally did that, I believe there's a way for the admin to scrub that for you.
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.
It was in a place of the world that is unlikely to be popular within the OSM community.
The larger users of the data are doing some degree of validation of changes before showing them to users.
> 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.
Editing software could be generally aware of high and low density locales and advise accordingly. And it could subdivide a large request into smaller ones. But the JOSM developers prefer to offer a closer-to-the-API experience.
[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6#Retrieving_map_...
This seems a bit outdated as many restaurants/shops now consider they FB/insta page as their "official" website (or rather lack of).
It's also the place that will allow you to inform your patrons when big tech deletes your heavily invested in social media account for some reason.
Not having a normal website means that potential customers who search for you get hit by login-walls for Instagram and Facebook if they're not on it, or 'you need an app for this' with crap like TikTok. It also makes my (volunteer) job of mapping the area around me harder, because I'm most certainly not going to bother to enter any additional info about your business if I have to go to Instagram or Facebook (and in the OpenStreetMap community I'm not alone in that).
[1] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/contact:facebook [2] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/contact:instagram
> 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.
A foot-carried google street car if you want.
mapillary got bought up by meta.
[1]: https://learnosm.org/en/beginner/id-editor/