Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap(high5apps.github.io) |
Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap(high5apps.github.io) |
Crazy stuff, definitely not for beginners
Would be interesting to see what involves contributing a real thing that’s not found on the net - a fence, footpath, etc. Or contributing a bus stop.
Java? No thanks. I don't want that monstrosity of system-hogging, clunk, slow, 1990's UIs on my system again.
Soon I thought "This would be easily done by an AI" and searched for it and found META's Rapid (https://rapideditor.org/) which does an ok job finding buildings, but really could go further and suggest the tags as well.
In general it's probably better to see if you can find an official map, and check if its license terms are compatible[1] with OSM.
[1] https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2017/03/17/use-of-cc-by-data/
A foot-carried google street car if you want.
Street view imagery is better for attributes on the actual street - mapillary did it first, with automated feature extraction for street signs etc, others have followed.
mapillary got bought up by meta.
?
> The name of the lake became politically contentious in August 2026, especially on maps. As OSM is not a consumer-facing product per se, the OpenStreetMap Foundation's longstanding policy regarding geopolitical disputes is to prioritize the on the ground rule by default but also record information about notable alternative claims, so that data consumers such as renderers and geocoders can choose what to present to end users.
> As of September 2026, the Lake Ontario relation has tags indicating its many names, most notably:
(linked page has nicer table)
> name Common name in the local language Lake Ontario English is the most commonly spoken language in both the US and Canada.
> name:en Common name in English globally Lake Ontario This name remains overwhelmingly popular both in the U.S. and abroad and so far continues to be used by most news and print media.
> name:fr Common name in French globally Lac Ontario Traditional name (in the other official language of Canada).
> official_name:en-US English name preferred by U.S. federal government agencies Lake America Official U.S. federal government position per GNIS and GNS, as ordered in Executive Order 14422. The order is only binding on the U.S. federal government, but the name is very unpopular according to opinion polling, particularly in local areas bordering the lake, and so far rarely used in news or print media.
sorry this is not profesional
2) have you made edit or created a note? Many notes are waiting for years for volunteer to verify them
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 started after one long day of cycling, I ran out of water before I could get home. It was bad. After that, I have been updating OSM with all the water sources I run across. Drinking water in parks, bottle refill stations at stores, water fountains that I run across.
It's not much, but it's honest work.
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 got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.
I believe most consumers of OSM just discard data like buildings and crosswalks and layer on top auto traced data which has 100% coverage.
I have over 2k contributions and most are from the Every Door app ( https://every-door.app/ ) on my phone.
If adding new data is too "scary", then maybe use StreetComplete ( https://streetcomplete.app/ ) which essentially asks questions about missing or existing old data.
I've added buildings, fixed layouts, etc, but that came later, after I better understood how things work.
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?
I used the web editor recently to add a street and path and to fix some names. It was about as clunky as the Google Maps web editor which I used for the same updates.
Just use the web page. It works, it's not hard to use and it's immediate when you have the urge and motivation to fix something on a map.
https://every-door.app - intermediate on-the-ground app for smartphones
https://rapideditor.org - AI-assisted mapping in browser
https://www.hotosm.org - task-based mapping in browser
https://josm.openstreetmap.de - advanced editor for desktop (this post)
https://www.comaps.app - actually use the map with ability to make minor changes
https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5421
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.
Then there is also mapping for humanitarian purposes, https://tasks.hotosm.org/, which has mapping projects prepared by disaster response teams, and you can help by updating maps of areas recently affected by disasters. E.g. recently there was a lot of mapping in the area hit by the August river flood in Nepal.
We're convinced most users (shopowners too) want to read and write in the same app.
> 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_...
Would highly recommend the web editor -- what's proposed here looks super comprehensive but way more difficult to use for a first timer.
If you accidentally did that, I believe there's a way for the admin to scrub that for you.
This seems a bit outdated as many restaurants/shops now consider they FB/insta page as their "official" website (or rather lack of).
I'm not sure anyone but me cares, since most people use Google maps. But it's satisfying to have accurate maps for myself at any rate.
Now I'm looking into automated edits, because in my region there's a lot of open data published by the government/local cities about locations of various types of features, like bicycle holders or bus stops, and it would be nice to keep that updated automatically.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Go_Map!!
(The double exclamation marks in the name drove me away initially, so I tried 3 others first, none of which worked well on the iPhone for my edits, but then "Go Map!!" seemed to just work.)
For edits that can be done from desktop, the OSM official Web site's editor was pretty good -- complicated, but seems to work, and has a nice interactive tutorial mode.
That's less true for niche stuff (vs stuff where two different ideas are in wide use), but there probably isn't all that much of it either.
One way to approach it is to not worry too much about it, consistency can come later.
I do understand that even if does get replaced eventually, it still was useful for a while, and probably served as the basis for whatever came after.
But still. For whatever reason, in my brain, it just diminished whatever psychological reward I got from adding information to OSM, which is a shame.
yes. Click on left circle in top-right, select orange icon ("Places" layer)
[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 of phrasing doesn't leave any room for interpretation.
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).
While all of then problems you list are real, small restaurant owners don’t have the time or skills to run a website, having a social media and listing on the maps apps is enough.
This was not because of vandalism, but because of how hard it was to update OSM when you don't do it often and might not look trustworthy. In Danish cities we have a complicated relationship with cars, we don't want them, but we do want the people they bring. One of the obstacles we create is having a lot of one way streets, and when OSM gets an error on those... well... suddenly there is a lot of addresses you simply can't reach. I once updated one of these errors with a photo from the internet, and it was rejected after a few miniutes because I had used an image from the internet which is (was?) against the TOS. Unfortunately the company we bought the API from was not doing any form of validation, so we had a week where our 5000 employess couldn't registerer driving to the most commonly used adress in the neighbouring city. I posted all sorts of documentation proving my official function, and had a discussion with the admins and even though they agreed I was right they refused to let me correct the mistake without real evidence. So eventually I drove my bicycle the 50km to the location, took some pictures and a couple with silly hats and submitted them and got my correction.
Once we had a local copy of the danish map we had no issues. I assume you would do this for any app relying on working routing data.
It was in a place of the world that is unlikely to be popular within the OSM community.
The last time I saw a collection of "biggest objects" for various tags it was mostly things that were just subtly mistagged (e.g., an entire forest being tagged as a single tree) rather than vandalism.
The larger users of the data are doing some degree of validation of changes before showing them to users.
If someone is a user, they'll have specific complaints. Claude Design is more than capable, which can then be fed directly into Claude Code to implement, test, iterate, and ship.
I agree that it lags behind coding and imo the highest leverage area for Anthropic to invest in. Hopefully they do so; UI is consistently one of the main (severe) differentiators between OSS and paid options.
However, UX can also be improved by some simple heuristics that could be seen as mechanistic by the standards of modern LLMs.
Performance and responsiveness, for example, contribute to UX even when the UI remains fixed. I’d wager Fable-level LLMs could improve perf on most open-source GUIs by benchmarking typical use cases and progressively applying standard tricks like caching, buffering, batching network calls.
That would appear to leave me with the choice of just using it for myself (lame) or I then have a public fork to maintain :(
If there's basically no shot of it getting up streamed I think I'd rather make something from scratch to suit my needs without the extras.
Anyway, I hope the AI overlords help us fund more maintainers soon!
If that forest's dominant tree happens to be a quaking aspen then technically speaking it might not have been mistagged.
My example might be an outlier on the easy side because they have a custom/plugins directory that will not have merge conflicts ever so I try to never modify the main init.lua and keep all of my changes separate in my own files. This prevents merge conflicts.
I can then ask my LLM to add a plugin or customize existing plugins by writing files in this separate directory to add/overwrite plugins and configurations. This works great for me.
If I were working in the main file creating merge conflicts, I could imagine it could get messy fast.