Street Complete is definitely the gateway drug here, very simple and beginner-friendly way to get started
this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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It's made like a game!
This app finds missing map data in your vicinity and displays it on a map as quests. Solve each quest by visiting the location on-site and answering a simple question to update the map.
Definitely ticks the "something interesting to do out on a walk" box that pokémon go did
I was actually doing some mapping once and was asked if I was also there for the pokemon go event.
Prime opportunity for some evangelising!
Be careful though: Pokémon Go players are known to have vandalized OpenStreetMap. Since the game uses it for the background map and for spawning Pokémon in thematic locations, they would create fake miniature parks, lakes etc. near their homes.
Interesting, I've been wondering how OSM deals with malicious changes
It's very similar to Wikipedia. Changesets can be filtered by multiple criteria such as geographical area, added/changed/deleted item count, software, declared sources, comment or account age. Moderation tools are mostly open source but by community members (not OSMF themselves), such as OSMCha.
My goal last year was to rank in the top 100 of my country.
I'm proud to say I'm nowhere near it. There's others who have taken the challenge, and I'm all for it!
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OSMAnd~ also has the option to edit.
I did it a few times, it really isn't hard! Just adding or fixing POIs though; I wouldn't know how to add or fix a wrongly placed house/path etc.
On the web editor of OSM its pretty easy to fix that should you want to
Not possible with OsmAnd, if you want to edit geometry you need a full featured editor. For Android one option is Vespucci.
As I said, I was just editing POIs.
Thank you for sharing these apps! Have been looking for this exact kind of thing ever since I abandoned Google maps. I contributed to Google maps for years. It'll be nice to contribute to something I believe in instead.
Enjoy! Same here! You can also contribute on mapy by doing reviews and uploading photos there!
I made 7 contributions last month
Organic Maps is a good app that also lets you do some editing. I like the interface better than osmand
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I like Every Door app, it makes it trivial to contribute and it's pretty nice
I found that one very cluttered/unintuitive and not at all beginnerfriendly. I resorted to StreetComplete, not quite the same but gives the same feeling while mapping the details from my surroundings. Its soo satisfying!
I have been loving https://maproulette.org/ for when I'm on my computer!
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Tell me what to get for my stupid iPhone.
Every Door works on iPhone
Edit: someone told me https://organicmaps.app/ also has editing functions and it has an iOS app
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Is there any way to do this on iDevices?
EveryDoor works well on iOS for simple things like updating or adding shops etc.
"Go Map!!" is another one, and while I find it's interface a bit harder to work with, it has a "Quests" setting, which lets you configure a filter of missing tags that show up on the map.
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Can this be done offline on Android devices and uploaded later? We ask because we currently have no data on our phone and it would be useful to edit when out, and then upload when we get back home.
It's possible with StreetComplete since you can choose when to submit your quests
Oh, awesome! We will do it when out and about then.
I do believe as long as you've opened your app to download the quests first it works, although I have not tried that.
You could also look at https://organicmaps.app/nl/ if that has offline editing for maps
Whenever we bike ride gravel roads, we always correct the surface.
Oh nice, I've thought about contributing to osm for a long time but this makes it so much easier to do that!!
I've looked into what I can do in my close vicinity and there are many roads that still miss their width. However, the app suggests to install an app (streetmeasure) to measure the width. This app is however based on Google AR services (that don't work on my degoogled phone. How do you guys deal with that? Do you just ignore those tasks or do you guesstimate the road width by eye?
Oh, and another thing: If you like something to do on your walks, may I suggest also looking into iNaturalist (and the companion app Seek), too. While you are walking around you can find so much stuff out there that you've previously overlooked. When I go through any street now I spot bugs and plants everywhere!
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I'm trying, but it's hard to stay motivated when the information on a lot of local areas I visit are so damn old.
There are entire areas where it looks like it acquired the data 5-10 years ago from some other mapping software (Google, Bing, something else), and hasn't updated since. It didn't have all of my street information for my neighborhood area, so I started there first. I didn't really mind it too much, because, hey, Google didn't have it filled in several years ago, either. I started using Vespucci and drew out some of the houses and streets.
But, as soon as I expand out, there are strip malls with really outdated information. StreetComplete tries to ask me questions about these places that were replaced long ago, and it doesn't have the tools to allow me to carve out sections of the strip mall, since it only thinks there are two shops, but there's now 8-10 shops. So, I go back to Vespucci and try to fill it out, but I only have so much time before I'm going to some other location, and I don't really have the time to draw out even the map details in the place where I'm parked. I feel like I'm the only one that bothers and the entire city is out-of-date. It's overwhelming.
If bots somehow got this information back then, then why can't it pull this data now? Certain sections and entire cities desperately need a refresh.
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I noticed one problem with the application; if you make a mistake you cant fix it yourself or cancel, even if you turn off automatic sending. There should be one more step before sending so you can review and edit your work first.
I suggest using streetcomplete for more basic things, it has an undo button!
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If I wanted to add some off-road bike trails to OSM, how would I got about doing that?
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Can't we just scrape Google maps and add things to OSM? 🤔
I think there's limitations to that. I also think ideally we should cut Google out our work chain anyways, and depending on data from there makes that functionally impossible. Stuff on maps changes, if we're scraping from Google maps now we're just gonna have to continue doing that. Instead we should normalize our own community work chains to build our own dataset.
Yep, best to verify the data either in person or at least via their website instead (if they have one)
I believe this is against their ToS and being caught doing that would mean all that data just gets removed again. But I'm no legal expert
Yes, it is. You should not copy from other maps (satellite imagery is okay as long as the license of the imagery allows it, for example Bing).
There is an old tradition of mappers deliberately placing very small errors to be able to verify the copying of a map. So no, scraping big chunks is a bad idea. But I sometimes check details on the Gmaps satellite image or streetview.
A well-mapped area on OpenStreetMap has much more details than Google Maps.
OSM allows more data point that's not accepted on Google Maps. Like people have been mapping farm and its crops type, flowerbed, road accessible for blind people, or row of trees.
Not to forget, Google Maps also have a lot of faulty data.
That would be illegal. Also Google puts in fake roads to detect things like this.
Don't do it.
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