It allows you to contribute by answering simple questions about your surroundings, like how many stories a building has or if a stairs has ramps for bikes or wheelchairs.
And all that with great UX.
EDIT: I don't want to dissuade anyone else from trying editing--it's fun. But, beware of the personalities, it can be like editing Wikipedia.
1: https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/3194/intersecting-d...
I noticed during a large urban area mapping on HOTOSM, one person was going around teaching everyone how to map tall buildings, he'd track down each commit and comment there with feedback, it was very nicely done in a non aggressive way. I was quite happy to learn.
It isn't obvious the first time you do it, for tall buildings you need to map the part of the building that intersects with the earth.
There are a lot of attempts to solve this problem with documentation on exactly how things should be done. The wiki, the stackoverflow-style help site, subreddit, tips in the editor software, mailing lists, slack... There are too many and they often don't agree. The information in some places changes quite rapidly, or in other places goes stale over time.
So we're bound to end up with incompatible approaches now and then. I've found it's often (certainly not always!) useful to politely communicate with other mappers. This works both ways -- I've stepped on toes, and I've had toes stepped on.
When you're staring at something ugly in OSM, the last person to work on it might have finished 5 minutes ago, or 5 years. But the tools to find out do exist. As the map gets more and more filled in, I expect that documentation aimed at new mappers will need to focus on communication and cooperation as much as direct editing of the map data.
Maybe they're doing more damage through their obsessive behavior as compared to a larger group of less enthusiastic members.
There's a public log of it: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/
It lists 20 per page. The navigation is at the bottom of the page.
There's 230 pages, so that's about 4600 banned users.
(There are many instances of a single person having created multiple blocked accounts though)
Mostly it's a lot of effort to be a barely visible vandal, so people just go away.
Standing up for things is mentally expensive so you don't want to stand up for everything in your life, stuff on the internet is not like if someone forced into your living room.
The recommended tags that have autocomplete stuff are pretty much always good enough.
I agree with you that it would be cool to have some piece of software that would just recommend improvements though.
(I understand wanting to use new iOS-only apps like Clubhouse, and for that I just have a really old test iPhone that i got second hand that I use just for that purpose only until those apps come out with Android versions.)
The assigned names was mostly tongue in cheek but also of course a bit true :) It's all trade-offs in the end anyway.
Last time I used an iPhone and took a picture and it didn't show up in the "Files" app. WTF? Reminds me of the times when Apple measured hard drive capacities in "songs" instead of GB.
The majority of users don't think in terms of files, and I'd say a significant fraction don't even know what a "file" is.
It's always easy to say 'mine' is better than 'yours'. But both have different philosophies and histories.
https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/1892 - "iOS version"
"So, the estimation for a MVP could be as little as 2 months for UI and 2 months for the core, so in total 4 months."
I now use it on walks, as years ago I used to walk with "Ingress" game.
https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/1892 - "iOS version"
"So, the estimation for a MVP could be as little as 2 months for UI and 2 months for the core, so in total 4 months."