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Comment by bowlich | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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