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Comment by 0815test | Hacker News Reader

> User-fed databases like this are all full of absolute garbage data, and have been gamed.

Is OSM equally bad? There's many ways to run a "user-fed" project.

OSM isn't, but I suspect it's mostly because it's not high profile enough (the old "nobody bothers writing viruses for Linux" problem). If it were, I'm sure we'd see junk data. OSM's data is version controlled in some way, so I'd assume it could be rolled back, but that sounds labor-intensive.

I use OSMand instead of Google Maps, and love it, except for the absolutely atrocious address parsing when searching. There's also a general lack of street numbers in my area (Pacific NW USA), which can make things difficult.

Amusingly, it also suffers from the "won't show you street name labels" problem that other posters are accusing Google Maps of.

Using the app Streetcomplete, it's really easy to correct OSM data like street numbers and opening times around you as you walk.

I have been working on adding all street numbers for a small town of 40,000 people. Two years into this project, I am still little more than halfway done. Adding a handful of street numbers with StreetComplete might be "easy", but it is incredibly labor-intensive to add street numbers in an amount that makes OSM actually useful for navigation purposes. Google only managed to get their house numbers by forcing the world to do the work through ReCAPTCHA or by buying the rights to various preexisting databases.

I wonder if OSMand could take advantage of having a few street numbers. Right now, in the "address search" mode, if the number you're looking for doesn't exist, you're out of luck. But theoretically it could accept any street number, and if a street even has a few numbers in place (I often find random street numbers probably entered by residents or shopowners) it could at least tell you "it's somewhere between here and there". Even that would be vastly more useful.

Then mapped crusaders like yourself could first focus on adding numbers in the middle of streets, and then gradually, in binary search fashion, continuing to halve unnumbered street sections.

One of the biggest challenges with mapping house numbers is simply getting to that street to begin with. It takes a volunteer making an effort to go to various parts of town that he/she doedn't normally go to, since most neighbourhoods don't have their own local mappers interested in adding house numbers.

Once someone has made that effort, then it isn't too much extra effort to do all the house numbers. So, no need to restrict oneself to the middle of the range.

OSMAnd's address search feature already allows you to choose from among the house numbers that do exist for a street, even if the whole street isn't mapped, so it is often easy to navigate to the general ballpark of your destination.

If you can make it a as addicting as pokémon go, it might work. It looks like they are trying since you get some points for "playing"

OSM's Slack is full of people patrolling spammy SEO edits and stuff. It's swiftly dealt with.

If the problem were much larger, it might overwhelm the people currently cleaning it up, but if OSM were higher profile, it would also presumably attract more volunteers.

Crucially, it would empower the people wronged by spam to do something about it, which is precisely the opposite of what Google's system does.

OSM has a community in most places. Nobody really cares about google.

A few years ago some idiot marked up pretty much every walk way in my town as a cycle way. As a keen cyclist who lives in a town with a somewhat poor provision for cycling, this is somewhat irritating as it makes our local government look like it is doing well.

I followed the feedback link and reported a whole heap of these, including links to Streetview showing the "No Cycling" signs in some places. I got automated replies to say that someone would deal with my report - but nothing happended. They are all still showing up.

Perhaps even Google doesn't care about Google.

There was a situation that happened in Thailand, where Grab (a ride-sharing company), outsourced OSM edits, and the company making the changes was doing via satellite pictures, and opposed to ground-truthing.

See https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/19/grab-maps-osm-thailand-sou...

No, but mostly because nobody directly uses OSM. They all use Google.

Same with Wikipedia. Wikipedia has been gamed a bit but the excellent moderators have kept many things at bay. I don't think it's impossible for someone like Encyclopedia Brittanica (an online version) to resurface.

Market share has something to do with it too. If as many people used OSM as use Google Maps, I'm sure that it would become just as bad.

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