Hi everyone, I made a new tool that hopefully will help tackle the immense number of unsolved Notes.
I hope you find it useful!
https://brzozo.ws/random-note/list
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The point is that most of the unresolved notes are unresolved because you cant decide by armchair mapping
For me a Note ALWAYS means - I need to go there. If i can decide from at home i would have done it already.
Flo
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True.
For me though, most of the notes that I leave unresolved is because I don’t know how to properly tag whatever is needed. I don’t want to spend much time studying the wiki and finding relevant cases while I’m solving open notes.
This may be true for Germany, but in other countries Notes usually are not monitored regularly.
Also for example addresses can be confirmed in official registers (in Poland - PRG).
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Mamy long standing notes are also clearly obsolete or become fixable thanks to new info or resources. Or were fixed already.
Or were unclear/meaningless/pointless all the time.
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True, but I use them for instance when a shop closes down to monitor the location and correct the data the moment a new owner has taken over.
Or all buildings on a factory site have been demolished to make space for appartments etc… during the transition period.
Hence, just to serve as a mnemonic.
I wish such kind of tags have an expiry date that comes along with them (with a default of one year and a maximum possible setting of two) which make them disappear the expiration date is reached.
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In countries outside of Switzerland and Germany you can find a lot of ooold notes that are easily fixable with armchair mapping. Simple stuff like “there is a mailbox here” or “The address of this house is main street 69”. And you also find a lot of really bad notes that I sometimes simply close, like talking about buildings in an area where nothing is visible on pictures even 5 years later, or someone just mashing random letters on the keyboard.
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Such notes require verification, and should not be blindly believed.
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The point is that if a note is older than 6 Month you want to go there and recheck. A postbox may have been there 6 Month ago.
I have Notes which are open like 8-10 Years - nobody bothered to go there again as they are remote places. You cant rely on anything on those notes.
Flo
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I don’t think opening notes that stay unsolved forever is a point of pride, that rather means you made a note which is obviously unactionable.
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Or that no one noticed it or that it no one wanted to deal with it. A long-time-opened note doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unactionable. Depending on the mapping activity of the area of course. It may be bad for Germany which is very active, but not for Alaska (for example) if the mapping activity is pretty low.
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An example that I just got from random: Note: 3644053 | OpenStreetMap
To me this seems very obvious and I’d just set shelter=yes without further verification. I think we need to trust people that much that they don’t troll people into getting rained on at a bus stop on purpose.
This seems better to me than to hope for someone local to eventually see the note years in the future or just to leave it open forever.
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You’d be surprised 
We (at OSM’s Data Working Group) have had several complaints about people adding unverified features based on notes. From memory, examples have included “street name is X not Y”, and the purpose was to allow the note adder to say later “look how easy it is to persuade people to add unverified data to OpenStreetMap! You can’t trust it…”
Quite a lot can be verified by aerial imagery of course (unmapped car parks, although you can’t set the access there, and possibly even shelters at bus stops).
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Also many notes look reasonable but are misplaced or confused.
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I think almost 98% of Notes are real information ( yes, maybe sometimes misplaced )… Old Notes can’t be trusted and i don’t see people traveling to confirm if the Note are real or not… A Note is the easiest way to contribute on openstreetmap, you don’t need an account.
With Streetcomplete and Fediphoto, you can take pictures to complement the Note… That’s why we like to host Notathons in Latam, solving Notes to learn and create community around them.
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I expected the same but was surprised. Give it a try! I solved a bunch of random notes in Germany and about 8 out of 10 were actionable.
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I redesigned the page to be easier to use. Let me now what you think. I will switch over the main version soon.
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Thank you for this tool! I really like the concept, it is kinda addicting .
Great tool. Would it be worth excluding notes with #surveyme in the text or a comment?
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Out of all 497029 open notes there are only 1762 with #surveyme in the body or comments. I may try this if I make sure it’s not going to affect update performance too much (it basically runs each minute so better be fast)
While we’re at it I fixed a bug which caused hidden notes not to get purged from the queue. So you should see less errors (I probably missed this as I can see them being a moderator )