Google Map Maker will be temporarily unavailable for editing

[anc84]

If you love map editing and collaborating on better map data for the people, http://www.openstreetmap.org/ is available for editing. You can choose from a multitude of editors, your edits are live within minutes and everyone can benefit from your contributions. OSM is free and open, you can download it all, you can do whatever you want with it, you are not feeding a corporation that might or might not appreciate your sacrifice.

[liotier]

Also, in return for your contributions, all you get from Google is a single map rendering whereas Openstreetmap offers a multitude of them, the possibility of making your own and the whole source data that Google will never let you see but that you need for any sort of analytical processing or joining with other datasets !

[weavie]

Out of interest what measures are there in OSM to prevent people 'pranking' the system and entering duff data?

[MatthewWilkes]

MapMaker was great for selfish reasons, though. My postcode had the wrong bounding box and some new roads were missing from it, MapMaker made it possible for me to get deliveries much more easily.

[outside1234]

Is there a FAQ somewhere on how to get started with the project as an amateur and mostly consumer of the data (but who would be willing to donate hiking, biking, and driving tracks)?

I'm assuming there must be an easier way of uploading GPS tracks than manually.

[buyx]

I'm not a protectionist, but Google Maps has been damaging high quality local mapping services because of its zero price-point. It is technically the best mapping service, but when the data is wrong, it is very wrong, and, the bigger the problems, the tougher it is to get them fixed, even using Map Maker.

After 2000, South African local governments were restructured. New municipalities were created by amalgamating formerly separate towns. The boundaries of those defunct towns are visible on Google Maps (as they should be, as an aid to navigation, since the new municipalities are huge).

The problem is that the boundaries of these defunct amalgamated towns are totally wrong on Google Maps, especially in the cases of the City of Johannesburg, and Ekurhuleni Municipality. Suburbs like Emmmarentia and Parkhurst in Johannesburg are supposedly in Randburg according to Google Maps, and this leads to enormous confusion when looking up addresses. Similarly, the boundaries of Bedfordview in Ekurhuleni are wrong. Trying to fix these boundary issues is futile, because one has no idea what criteria are used in moderation, and it takes a very long time to do these fixes, only to risk having them rejected.

Google needs to invest more in Maps, rather than trying to get away on the cheap with half-baked crowdsourcing, and it needs to make sure that it responds to error reports quickly and transparently.

[liotier]

> After 2000, South African local governments were restructured. New municipalities were created by amalgamating formerly separate towns. [..]

In France, administrative boundaries are updated in Openstreetmap about as fast as the government publishes them. Don't wait for Google !

[paganel]

Three of four years ago GMaps used to display as open and operating a highway linking my city (Bucharest) to another city 40 miles away. The problem was that that highway was in no way open nor operating, as it was still under construction. I completed that "this-place-is-wrong"-form describing the issue and received a message back saying that bla-bla-bla the map is correct and I am wrong. That only increased my reliance on trusted paper maps from that day on.

[jarek]

It's interesting to see how Google is consistently missing those local things. In Iceland http://en.ja.is/kort has way better satellite imagery and OSM has better maps. In Poland most transit data is missing from Google Maps and only available on local apps (e.g. Jakdojade.pl). People catch on sooner or later.

[rmc]

OpenStreetMap is a free wiki map (which I'd say in some areas is a the better mapping service technically). You can update the map yourself, and it's shown immediatly. You can meet up and discuss with local mappers on how to map something. You don't need to wait for Google.

[detaro]

Maybe the way Microsoft is doing it really is the better one: give resources to OpenStreetMap and let them take care of the community work. Both sides win.

[maxerickson]

Does Microsoft use OSM data for anything?

They provide a lot of server resources by allowing OSM to reference Bing satellite/aerial imagery, but I've never seen any direct use of the data (they could certainly be using it ways that are not obvious).

[bitL]

This is probably one of the worst responses Google could take - who is going to enjoy waiting weeks/months for their change to be reviewed and added to a map when the whole point of community editing was to enable near-realtime changes to map observed by people living in the area? Throwing out the baby with the bath water. One prank and the whole community suffers beyond reasonable limits.

[sidcool]

Probably the prank cost them too much. We don't know what happened behind the scenes. They might have just dodged a lawsuit.

[vesinisa]

If they allow unreviewed community edits to the map, why don't they also allow users to revert changes by others? This is how Wikipedia deals with vandalism at least.

[JustSomeNobody]

People with a bit of patience? It's really not that long to wait. And if it keeps childish acts such as this from happening, we're all the better for it.

[rmc]

Hopefully those mappers will move over to OSM where their changes are saved and shown within minutes.

[Fogest]

Everyone is suggesting OSM here, but I am confused how OSM is any better at keeping out these kinds of spam based edits, especially if it is someone who has made a lot of edits? From what I have seen it would be open to the same kind of problem.

[andor]

OSM probably has a much larger community of editors. Both in absolute numbers and as a share of the users.

Because OSM is a community project, editors are more likely to feel responsible for map quality. On Map Maker, users also have limited possibilities once they find problems. I once tried to undo a malicious edit, and as far as I can remember my only options were to comment on it, and to "report a problem".

[Piskvorrr]

It's way faster at responding to incorrect edits (be they errors/mistakes/vandalism), in my experience. Spam etc. is unavoidable, as with any wiki-type project, but there are (well documented) mechanisms for dealing with it (as opposed to Google's "just drop us a note, and we might take a look, eventually, maybe").

Anecdote: I have tagged a street as "private access only" - and within hours, another mapper contacted me, asked if I took pedestrians into account (I didn't - the access restriction was actually for vehicles), and corrected my edit. Another time I have noticed that a street nearby changed type from "residential" to "secondary" (which does have real-life impacts, e.g. maximum allowed speed); checked IRL and with the mapper, and edited the map to better reflect the actual state.

[rmc]

OSM is full of local people mapping their area, and people care about the map (rather than helping out a big corporation).

[JosephRedfern]

This was posted yesterday, too - previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519535

[clockwerx]

I think that http://tasks.hotosm.org/ has the balance of edit, review down pat.

[daw___]

More on the 'most recent incident': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9432504

[graemian]

Major strategic blunder: the whole world was updating their proprietary map data for them, but they failed to engineer the process to be spam-proof. Now they've had to stop accepting contributions as a result. Many contributors are likely to switch to updating someone else's map data, and Google risks no longer having the most up-to-date maps of the entire planet. Larry Page needs to kick some ass.

[smackfu]

>they failed to engineer the process to be spam-proof

That's a bit naive. They have been getting business spam constantly from the day they opened. Like businesses marking their competitors as closed, or moving their own location so it is closer to their customers.

[Piskvorrr]

"Spam-proof" is, since the beginning of (unix)time, an ever-receding ideal, not a point that you could actually reach, or even reach and hold. I believe that in the continuum between "lots of spam, some data" and "no spam, but also no data" a point needs to be chosen (and re-chosen) which is "good enough." Shutting the whole thing down is IMNSHO not this point, and certainly an overreaction.

[nkozyra]

'This is why we can't have nice things'

[learnstats2]

Why, exactly?

Is it because Google asked for a bunch of free work to support its commercial interests without providing any oversight at all? And now they won't provide the resources to fix their problem?

Doesn't it seem likely that one of Google's goals here was just to compete with and thus extinguish existing free services? Is that why we can't have nice things?

[rmc]

Except that OpenStreetMap is a real wiki map and is producing a real map to rival Google Maps. We can have nice things, We have OSM

[Achshar]

How awesome would it be if all the big players contributed their effort to one open source platform. Much like how WC3 works. Everyone would benefit from the work they do and they can instead compete on the features or the front end they provide to their users. If google moves their data to openstreetmap then everyone stays up to date including google.

[Demiurge]

This is not a new problem. You just cant trust an individual, even with a long history. The solution is to have individuals check up on each other. If some users are interested in drawing, other users should be interested in moderating.

[icebraining]

And then you end up with the interminable whining regarding the moderation - see Wikipedia, StackExchange, etc.

[fnordfnordfnord]

It was practically unavailable in my area anyway. I'd already grown tired of fixing some really bad errors on the maps surrounding my neighborhood and workplace only to have the fixes reverted by someone or something else.

[sebgeelen]

I wonder how the edits could be pre-review by an image analysis tool, that will auto detect if the submitted path is a text or a logo. Might speed up the manual process.

[anc84]

The Android pissing on Apple was created step by step with shapes that by itself looked totally clean. This would not work.

[beyti]

For the people who didn't know the related prank like me, which led to this result: here is a quick summary about it: http://techaeris.com/2015/04/24/google-android-mascot-shown-...

[mukundmr]

It is a welcome move if they are able to figure out a solution to retain quality. This problem exits more prominently in Google translate where people game the system and I guess that the translation is supposed to correct itself over a period of time with people fixing the mistake.