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Comment by doombolt | Hacker News Reader

What makes OpenStreetMap shine really is their desire to map every man-made and natural object.

I'm talking about things like trees, garbage bins and industrial buildings.

Commercial maps has areas where they care deeply, and areas where there's zero care. OpenSteetMap cares about everything. If you are a hobbyst (of practically anything), sooner or later you'll find better representation of your narrow interests on OSM than on Google or Apple maps.

Google has awesome maps of shopping centers. OSM has awesome maps of tracks in woods and parks. You've got to choose your life style here.

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Google Map's lack of geographic features has been off putting for me for quite some time. They can list every last commercial entity under the sun, but can't be bothered to get the name of a river correct, name high points (which would be useful for navigation), canyons/ravines are generally missing. Items like campgrounds tend to direct to commercial enterprises rather than dispersed sites.

OSM has all of that, it's great.

I haven't had time to really dig into OSM. One item that confuses me is the community-based editing which lends me to not wanting to touch it out of fear I'll cross someone (like Wikipedia). I do a lot of personal mapping on Google Earth of routes, points of interest, etc., just dumping GPS data out after walks. I would like to do the same on OSM, and store it as my own private overlay but I don't see how.

> One item that confuses me is the community-based editing which lends me to not wanting to touch it out of fear I'll cross someone (like Wikipedia).

This is what drove me away 7 years ago (actually crossing someone, not just the fear). It's interesting to hear that this is still a relevant concern today.

> store it as my own private overlay but I don't see how.

I would expect this is possible with the right software, but it may mean actually keeping a synced, private copy of the entire OSM database, which could get cumbersome.

You might also check if there have been any projects that have succeeded in doing some kind of dynamic/living fork and what technology they use.

There's no personal mapping features on osm.org.

You could try http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/

As far as crossing someone, it certainly happens that people get territorial and there are lots of relatively pointless objections, but many people welcome improvements in the areas they pay attention to. And then a difference with Wikipedia is that in OSM, if you go look at something and establish ground truth, that's the gold standard.

You can look at http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions to see what a lot of interactions end up looking like. Usually polite and straightforward.

I've been adding to OSM maps for about 5 years, mostly in the UK, but also on Humanitarian OSM. I've had no problems with crossing people.

I think it differs from wikipedia in that I am usually adding to the map (mostly paths and buildings), rather then editing existing objects (except when they are out of date) - so conflicts are not likely to occur.

Possibly in regions where the map is already 'perfect' there might be conflicts, but you are less likely to be editing such areas, I expect.

Does this include items indoors? Such as pinball machines?

You can not necessarily create a point for a single pinball machine (yet), but the Key:Leisure allows you to have a rather fine level of details.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:leisure

It mentions "amusement_park" to tag areas with

"A venue with pay-to-play games, such as video games, driving simulators, pinball machines, merchandisers, etc."

Sure.

If you can go look at it and it is relatively static, that's good enough.

So trees are much more accepted than say flowers.

So far only 1 has been mapped using the obvious tag:

https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/ABP

There are ways to map things indoors, like corridors, stairs, and shops/facilities inside large buildings (eg. train stations)

https://openlevelup.net/

OSM has awesome maps of tracks in woods and parks and shopping centres.

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