Newbie Question about implied extend of annotations

General talk
1

Hi all, I am a new OSM fan. Have been using OSM passively for a while, now also trying light touch “contribution” via streetcomplete and hopefully will get deeper with time. Quite fond of this beautiful ecosystem people have built and curious where it will lead do.

I have a question about streetcomplete (I am not sure there is any more targeted forum for this). As I started to provide some easy answers to streetcomplete I experience some ambiguity with questions about extended objects. For example one question asks “is the road lit here” or what the type of foliage within some area etc. When selecting the question pin it highlights a map object (a line or a polygon) but the spatial correspondence with the question is not always clear or intuitive: For example a street lamp generally covers a small area. Would lamps spaced at 10m or 20m or 40m all qualify as a “lit street”?

Anyway I hope the gist of my question is clear. I guess it boils down to what is the desired / target spatial resolution that all this additional user provided information is assigned to?

happy new year

2

I think for lit streets you are usually referring to the whole highlighted section. It is relatively rare to map individual streetlight: this is really a level of detail more over what StreetComplete is expecting. Streets may be split into several objects to handle things like numbers of lanes, parking restrictions and so forth. So you may get the question repeated as you walk down a street.

Similarly I would anticipate that foliage refers to the whole area outlined. This may well be wrong (i.e., the area has a mix of trees), but you cant address that directly with StreetComplete other than commenting to the “unable to answer” text.

Note: I’m not a user of StreetComplete so my answers are incomplete.