So I have a fairly fresh newcomer's perspective and here's what I suggest to get started: keep it simple and start local. As others have noted, skip the complex mapping app and go straight to the website for feature edits, or download a simple mobile app like Every Door and focus on businesses and landmarks near you. Go on a walk around your neighborhood and look for old/incorrect/missing businesses. There may be errors near you about places you actually care about, and it is really gratifying to fix those.

There were restaurants near me that were missing, shops that had changed hands, etc., that were easy fixes but years overdue. I captured some basics (names, posted hours, the phone number posted on the door, etc.) with Every Door, and then later logged into the main OSM website and fine-tuned the entries. I got into a pattern of fixing one or two entries every evening when I went out for a walk and pretty soon my walking route was all up-to-date. Then I started paying attention to things like stop signs and cross walks and found a whole new kind of little, incremental edits that nobody else was doing.

It's been fun, I've made useful contributions, and my laptop is still Java free.

I've considered building a separate app that's similar but oriented around the idea of using voice of pictures to update things (with AI extracting and formatting the data for you to review). But alas making yet another tool isnt ideal.

However, UX can also be improved by some simple heuristics that could be seen as mechanistic by the standards of modern LLMs.

Performance and responsiveness, for example, contribute to UX even when the UI remains fixed. I’d wager Fable-level LLMs could improve perf on most open-source GUIs by benchmarking typical use cases and progressively applying standard tricks like caching, buffering, batching network calls.

That would appear to leave me with the choice of just using it for myself (lame) or I then have a public fork to maintain :(

If there's basically no shot of it getting up streamed I think I'd rather make something from scratch to suit my needs without the extras.

Anyway, I hope the AI overlords help us fund more maintainers soon!

I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.

That's less true for niche stuff (vs stuff where two different ideas are in wide use), but there probably isn't all that much of it either.

One way to approach it is to not worry too much about it, consistency can come later.

I do understand that even if does get replaced eventually, it still was useful for a while, and probably served as the basis for whatever came after.

But still. For whatever reason, in my brain, it just diminished whatever psychological reward I got from adding information to OSM, which is a shame.

Using JOSM for your 1st edit is definitely not recommended.

Doing the same with iD (the editor embedded in the OSM website) is faster and there's even a tutorial that will explain a bit about how things work.

I mainly chose JOSM for this tutorial because of its filter. As a beginner (just a few weeks ago), I couldn't figure out how to use iD's filter to show JOSM's equivalent of `name=* ((amenity=* "addr:housenumber"=*) | shop=*) -website=* -"contact:website"=*`. For this tutorial I wanted something better than than "click around the map until you find a place without a website." That felt like it'd be a frustrating and inefficient first experience.

Is there a way to make that filter in iD?

I used the web editor recently to add a street and path and to fix some names. It was about as clunky as the Google Maps web editor which I used for the same updates.

Just use the web page. It works, it's not hard to use and it's immediate when you have the urge and motivation to fix something on a map.

I have over 2k contributions and most are from the Every Door app ( https://every-door.app/ ) on my phone.

If adding new data is too "scary", then maybe use StreetComplete ( https://streetcomplete.app/ ) which essentially asks questions about missing or existing old data.

I've added buildings, fixed layouts, etc, but that came later, after I better understood how things work.

https://every-door.app - intermediate on-the-ground app for smartphones

https://rapideditor.org - AI-assisted mapping in browser

https://www.hotosm.org - task-based mapping in browser

https://josm.openstreetmap.de - advanced editor for desktop (this post)

https://www.comaps.app - actually use the map with ability to make minor changes

Then there is also mapping for humanitarian purposes, https://tasks.hotosm.org/, which has mapping projects prepared by disaster response teams, and you can help by updating maps of areas recently affected by disasters. E.g. recently there was a lot of mapping in the area hit by the August river flood in Nepal.

If it's something you end up enjoying, one really satisfying thing to do is pick a small rural town and improve the map. With a few hours, it's not hard to make the OSM data more detailed and better than any other publicly available map.

> The area you tried to downlaod is too big or your request was too large.

And no indication whatsoever of how big the area should be, I'm at my fifth attempt so far.

Editing software could be generally aware of high and low density locales and advise accordingly. And it could subdivide a large request into smaller ones. But the JOSM developers prefer to offer a closer-to-the-API experience.

[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6#Retrieving_map_...

Soon I thought "This would be easily done by an AI" and searched for it and found META's Rapid (https://rapideditor.org/) which does an ok job finding buildings, but really could go further and suggest the tags as well.

It was in a place of the world that is unlikely to be popular within the OSM community.

The last time I saw a collection of "biggest objects" for various tags it was mostly things that were just subtly mistagged (e.g., an entire forest being tagged as a single tree) rather than vandalism.

The larger users of the data are doing some degree of validation of changes before showing them to users.

This seems a bit outdated as many restaurants/shops now consider they FB/insta page as their "official" website (or rather lack of).

[1] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/contact:facebook [2] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/contact:instagram

> Determine if any of the search results represent the official website for your place. Do NOT use search results for social media profiles, review sites, or other business aggregators. When in doubt, don’t use it.

This zero-option style of phrasing doesn't leave any room for interpretation.

It's also the place that will allow you to inform your patrons when big tech deletes your heavily invested in social media account for some reason.

Not having a normal website means that potential customers who search for you get hit by login-walls for Instagram and Facebook if they're not on it, or 'you need an app for this' with crap like TikTok. It also makes my (volunteer) job of mapping the area around me harder, because I'm most certainly not going to bother to enter any additional info about your business if I have to go to Instagram or Facebook (and in the OpenStreetMap community I'm not alone in that).

While all of then problems you list are real, small restaurant owners don’t have the time or skills to run a website, having a social media and listing on the maps apps is enough.

If you accidentally did that, I believe there's a way for the admin to scrub that for you.

[1] - https://streetcomplete.app/

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Go_Map!!

(The double exclamation marks in the name drove me away initially, so I tried 3 others first, none of which worked well on the iPhone for my edits, but then "Go Map!!" seemed to just work.)

For edits that can be done from desktop, the OSM official Web site's editor was pretty good -- complicated, but seems to work, and has a nice interactive tutorial mode.

Crazy stuff, definitely not for beginners

Would highly recommend the web editor -- what's proposed here looks super comprehensive but way more difficult to use for a first timer.

[1]: https://learnosm.org/en/beginner/id-editor/

A foot-carried google street car if you want.

mapillary got bought up by meta.

?