Sorry to write in English, but it’s the only way I can think of to get in touch with the Italian community.
Hiking routes are generally mapped very thoroughly in Italy, from what I can see. However, that is not the case for some of the E-paths E1 to E12 managed by the European Ramblers Association that go through Italy. For instance, E7 looks very incomplete.
I have proposed an initiative to finalize and maintain these E-paths, and ERA has told me they support the initiative. Are there Italian contributors who would like to help with the Italian part of these routes?
I don’t understand how could we help, I tried to look into the link you shared but I was unable to find anything to help us to improve the map specially for all the missing paths
From what I understand, mapping routes is often different from other kinds of mapping in OSM because a significant part of the activity consists in finding usable sources. Sometimes there is no other option than walking the route.
In France for instance we are lucky enough to have good aerial imagery for mapping paths, but when the route crosses a forest we need to use the Strava heat map. And for the routes themselves (what paths do they use ?) we are not allowed to use the data from our national hiking federation, and the European federation relies on OSM data more than the opposite. So, we need to find other sources (eg local tourism offices)
From what I understand, mapping routes is often different from other kinds of mapping in OSM because a significant part of the activity consists in finding usable sources. Sometimes there is no other option than walking the route.
Walking and collecting data personally should be always the main source of OSM (but this is not happening since long time)
In France for instance we are lucky enough to have good aerial imagery for mapping paths, but when the route crosses a forest we need to use the Strava heat map. And for the routes themselves (what paths do they use ?) we are not allowed to use the data from our national hiking federation, and the European federation relies on OSM data more than the opposite. So, we need to find other sources (eg local tourism offices)
It is not clear to me if the E-paths are well marked on the territory so if we walk on a E-path we are able to understand that this path is a E-path.
I just discovered that E-paths in Italy [0] are managed by FIE [1], so probably the best is to contact them. I could do that in the case…
That depends a lot on countries and places. Sometimes you know that “E2 follows GR5 between A and B” from documentation only. Sometimes you get one sign every now and then. Sometimes (rarely) it is heavily signed.
It would be great, hoping that they have the same kind of positive attitude as e.g. in Belgium