My personal approach with notes is this: I make a note when something is broken or incorrect by the thing the note refers to being mapped improperly. For example, the service ways of a parking lot not being mapped by itself doesn’t seem like an especially pressing problem (this is normally just a lack of detail, the “default”) but it can be more clearly important when a POI is closer to one adjacent street than another but there’s no access into the parking lot from that street, so navigation tries to put users on an invalid path.
A good note gives a good impression of what issue resolving it would solve, some sense of the urgency of the issue, and an easily actionable path to resolution. Something like “this village has no sidewalks mapped” is actionable, but not easily (it’s more of a small project than a single issue), and doesn’t convey why the sidewalks here are so important to map as opposed to anywhere else that their absence is an exceptional issue.
Going through a phase of my OSM participation where I often didn’t have a lot of time to work on any particular thing got me to appreciate this a bit. There are improvements to be made all around, but a lot of them are realistically just “nice to haves”. Notes should be for small improvements whose absence is causing some kind of issue.
I never said to write notes with “this could be mapped better” but I always said that something was missing from 0, not wrong shapes, not wrong tags (for which you should use fixme tags) but for things that are just not on the map. Those are 2 different things what I said and what you say.
It would be nice to map everything, but often in OSM we only focus on roads and buildings, the rest is ignored, so why not highlight the absence of something?
everything is useful on osm, that’s why you don’t have to close the notes without solving them!
Where does it say that notes are only for non-mappers? This seems to me to be a false idea that many have. The absence of the entire network of sidewalks as it can be of anything else is a “problem” that needs to be solved as much as a missing shop. There is no other tool to report the absence of something (fixme tag is only for errors in existing OECD tags). I also map and I believe that there is a need to point out the lack of something since sidewalks like other things are never part of the priority of 99% of mappers (I am not forcing anyone to resolve the note). Only roads and buildings are modified, why can’t the problem be pointed out? Instead of making a thousand notes for each single missing sidewalk, why not make a single one if they are missing on all the streets of a neighborhood or a small center of a city? I keep saying that closing the note without solving it is illegal, if you don’t have time to address the problem, leave it open, don’t close it!!
IMHO it is implicit. I do not say that mappers should never open a note, but generally I would expect that mappers solve problems instead of listing them, if one as a mapper opens more notes than they close, there would be something wrong about it, IMHO.
because, as we already said above, there is no set of “must have” features or properties. Arguably, we are aiming at mapping all streets and many people are focussing on this, but it isn’t forbidden either to map forests or peaks where the roads are yet missing. Would you appreciate if I added some generic notes in your hometown “commissioning” some free work to do, like “building colors missing in the whole town”, “fountain types are not mapped yet”, “add kerb heights everywhere”, “tree species missing”, “street cabinets and types mostly missing”, “fences and fence heights are missing”, “wall types not specified for barrier=wall”, “streetlamps missing”, “specify masonry type”, “most fire hydrants are missing”, etc. etc.
In OSM it is the mappers who decide what to map, it is their free time, and they are free to focus on what they prefer. When I started mapping in 2008, I added many drinking fountains despite sometimes the streets not being drawn yet (in retrospect, it would sometimes have been helpful to at least sketch some part of the street to make it clear on which side of the road the feature is located, but on the meantime these all got sorted out).
If you add generic notes with comments like “A and B missing everywhere here”, it will distract people from finding useful notes which actually have suffient information to base your mapping on it, so closing the not helpful ones is the correct answer to advance the project as a whole.
Unfortunately, everyone has their own priorities when mapping on OSM, so we can’t easily give a guideline on what work to start. When there is something wrong (shape or tag) you should use fix me tags, not notes. I found myself reporting the lack of sidewalks because I was planning a long walking route and I would have needed to have them mapped, since many mappers don’t consider them, maybe someone willing would take this little project in hand and fix the problem. Instead, someone preferred to close the note without solving it. Without official documentation or guidelines on the use of notes, no one can decide what is right and what is wrong
If we were to say that notes force a mapper to do something then we should ban them.
If a mapper chooses to follow notes and not his “instinct” he obviously has no idea what to do but wants to lend a hand and relies on notes. So why do you want to ban notes that require more time than simpler ones? It will be the mapper who decides whether to spend a whole week mapping the sidewalks of a neighborhood or choose to map the ancient tree protected by local laws. Everyone chooses what to do (as you say and I agree). I am not forcing anyone to do anything with my notes, I am just reporting a problem, then whoever wants to take over the project. I myself have been mapping all the sidewalks in my city for months going neighborhood by neighborhood, so it is not impossible.
I also don’t understand what more details you want for the sidewalks, they are simple sidewalks. Maybe you want thousands of notes for every single meter of missing sidewalk? It becomes spam of notes, better to make a single one…
The reason I want to discourage notes which do not provide specific information but rather are attemps to assign some kind of investigation task to someoneelse, is that it leads us into the situation where we are now with notes. Tens of thousands of open notes in many countries, some for more than 10 years, and too few people fixing them, likely even looking at them. It is discouraging to see a sea of notes, while just a few notes (speaking for myself) would be encouraging going to discover what kind of information is waiting to be added.
I have already tried to explain it before, missing sidewalks aren’t “a problem”, they are the default, no note needed to say “all sidewalks are missing”, it is implicit.
naturally you can have all kind of properties on sidewalks, like width, surface, smoothness, lit, start_date, etc.
No, as I said, I would expect the note creator to map these, rather than trying to assign tasks to others…
no, having 400 notes “there is an unmapped grass area here” is NOT useful
and this is an actual real case we had (notes got closed and hidden, at some point with automated bot run by DWG)
having note “some shops are not mapped in this city” is not useful either (also a real case)
because notes that I mentioned, like “would be nice if all sidewalks here would get mapped” or “would be nice if all shop in city would get mapped” are nearly unfixable, and would just stay there for long time irritating people who process notes? While bringing no benefit?
And having an actual negative effects in terms of discouraging people to even look at notes?
