Some questions from a newbie

General talk
1

Hi all,
I admit, I got started on OSM mostly due to PoGo, but I’m not making up fake parks or anything. I live in a rural area and lots of houses, streams, and parks were not mapped. I’ve been adding those to my area to help improve the look of PoGo.

So, first question: I was looking around in a city near me and found a place where a user had used markers (the upside down tear drop) to mark every house and put the address in it. See here: https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit#map=18/39.16363/-86.60754. In Edit mode, this looks really sloppy, but it actually looks kind of nice in the normal viewing mode. Is what this person did bad practice? Is a better way to draw the outline of the house and then add the address to the drawn shape?

Second question: a lot of what I’m doing is tracing in buildings and assigning a type to them, like house, building, commercial building, post office, etc. Am I correct in thinking that this is value added? In my mind, even if I don’t know what a building is, if I trace it and label it a building, someone might come along later and add the correct name.

Third question: what do you set a county fairgrounds as? I’ve seen it set as a park, and I’ve seen it set as a tourist attraction (which seems wrong to me).

Fourth question: from reading the forums some, you guys seem to tread very lightly with modifying others work. I have seen some really terrible work in the surrounding towns and I don’t hesitate for a second to correct it. Is this bad form? As an example, a building outline that was completely misshapen, road traces that went off the road into woods, markers dropped seemingly randomly with no info on them at all.

Finally, I am an active PoGo player, so if you have any questions about the game or how we think OSM interacts with PoGO, feel free to ask.

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  1. This is a question of how much effort the mapper is prepared to put in, and whether or not they have up to date imagery, or the surveying tools, to allow them to produce reasonably accurate shapes. Whilst having the addresses on building=house area, is better than having it on a node, I personally think having addresses on a node is better than the common situation where buildings are mapped as areas, but with no address.

  2. Yes. Provided that you have strong evidence for the type of building, ideally looking it on the ground, although sometimes high resolution aerial imagery may be enough.

  3. Pass.

  4. If the result is clearly more correct than the original, just do it, but consider leaving a comment, if the original mapper is still active. Where things get difficult is when there is a question of interpretation. Your first two examples are geometry errors and should be unarguable, however beware of doing things from aerial imagery, as discrepancies can be the the result of using out of date imagery. Untagged nodes that are not part of a way should generally be removed, although it might be a good idea to ask the original mapper what they were trying to do. Be careful to look a the all tags list on iD, as they may simply not have a tag that iD can handle.