OpenStreetMap
Since OpenStreetMap is going to have a few days of downtime I was pondering what other thing, other than mapping, I could do to help keep moving the project forward. I’ve decided I’m going to spend my time going through the bugs on MapDust (http://www.mapdust.com/) and marking invalid bugs. The idea is that if we can get through the cruft in MapDust, it will make finding and squashing legitimate bugs much easier. Based on my anecdotal experience, probably a good 70%+ of the bugs there are invalid. Getting rid of all those bugs is one way we can continue helping improve the state of OSM while we can’t actually map. A few other things I may do is just take pictures of areas and jot down notes, such as street numbers, so that when the servers come back online I’ll have a wealth of data to begin entering. If anyone else has any ideas of ways to help in the meantime please post.
Discussion
Comment from !i! on 30 March 2012 at 07:00
Sounds good Max :)
Another idea: Wiki cleanup Most might expect this to be a boring/expert job, but it’s not. Let’s fix some minor things as checking page translations, translating pages, fixing broken links, or just mark pages as somewhat incomplete. Wikiteam will help you, for sure!
Comment from EdLoach on 30 March 2012 at 07:43
Getting rid of the initial crud can be time consuming, but once done you can get an RSS feed for an area and keep on top of new reports.
Most of the valid reports I was getting near here were about missing speed limits, so I made an effort to add them to as many roads as possible (I have a few still to do), but this made the new bug reports even less frequent (and often still useless with no description of the issue, though I do still review the area where the bug was reported to see if there is anything obvious).
Comment from chriscf on 30 March 2012 at 21:25
I don’t know if they’ve changed, but half the time my problem with MapDust was that the report didn’t tell you where the person was going - it’s all well and good saying the app gave you unexpected directions, but we can’t even begin to figure out what’s wrong if we don’t know where you expected to go.
Comment from maxolasersquad on 31 March 2012 at 13:14
@!i! Wiki cleanup is a great idea.
@EdLoach I’m subscribed to the RSS feed for Florida, where I reside. I make sure all new bugs get addressed in a timely manner. I hope to one day have all bugs in Florida addressed.
@chriscf There’s a lot of problems with the MapDust bug reporting, and it doesn’t look like they plan on addressing them any time soon. Like EdLoach, I always just look at the map in the area of bug report, so even if the report is useless, I may find a problem worth fixing there, and maybe that problem was what the reporter was trying to report.