Hello! Congratulations for your first edit and welcome to our community! Indeed, there is a lot to be done in rural areas and OSM is by far the best data source for hiking maps - way more detailed and up-to-date than Google etc. Your contribution is worth a lot!

Let me give you a few hints: When I plan to map certain features, let’s say a few unmapped paths in the forest, I will have a look at the OSM wiki page for the elements I am likely to add. Example: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dpath As you can see, every element can have a great variety of additional attributes. If you are aware of these, you can generate much richer information from a single mapping hike.

When I am hiking in forest areas, I try to bring along two independent GPS receivers (or better: a combined GPS/GLONASS/Baidu/… receiver like many modern smartphones) for improved accuracy. Even better: walk the paths several times to have even more GPS tracks. Loading all of them in JOSM will give you a good hint about the accuracy of your data. Draw your path as an average of all tracks, discarding outliers.

I sometimes upload my tracks into OSM, this helps the project to prove that the data was not illegally copied from other maps, but was genuinely created.

Have fun! Hendric

2 million. Consider me officially impressed! Congratulations and keep up the great work!

@rorym: I appreciate your comment. I am taking care of the notes in my home region or during my travel. What I would like to see is an integrated service unifying the separate resources of OSM notes, Keepright and other QA tools, so we can have it all in one place and fix them more easily.

A mon avis, ce sont des traces GPS d’une personne qui a oublié d’éteinder son appareil en rentrant dans cette maison. Le GPS perd alors une bonne partie de sa précision et commence à “sauter” dans tous les sens, créant ainsi ce type de traces vagabondes.

I feel your pain and frustration! Generally, I bring along two GPS devices: one dedicated Garmin eTrex plus a phone running OSMand. So, there is little risk of having zero usable traces at the end.

Sorry, natürlich Schweiz!

Da sieht man - auch in deutschland ist noch lange nicht alles kartiert. Danke für Ihren Beitrag und weiterhin frohes Mappen!

Perhaps the guy is from the UK and has put the “oneway” direction as he would expect in his own country… :-) Also, this example shows well how important it is to document the changes we make by adding a meaningful comment. This helps to understand if the intention of the mapper matches the nature of the change.

Bienvenue

et beaucoup de plaisir dans tes contributions pour OSM!

My suggestion to fix the issue manually, at least partly: Create a new maproulette task. Would this be a conceivable solution?

Oui, certes!

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for this interesting article. It is indeed good to read that your country is slowly and steadily recovering from the horrific events of 1994. Rwanda is an encoureaging exception in a continent that appears to many people as the home of failed states (Libya, Somalia just to name a few). Rebuilding a country is always a tremendous effort, requiring millions of small steps. Let’s hope that the OSM people through their work will provide one of these steps.

Take care! Hendric

Hallo!

Für mich war die Kartierung von öffentlichen verkehrsmitteln immer ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln, da habe ich mich nie herangetraut. Sollten Dich Deine Mapping-Aktivitäten nach Perchtoldsdorf verschlagen, dann helfe ich gern mit!

Freundliche Grüße! Hendric

Hello!

I can confirm having seen a similar effect, even though I did not systematically evaluate it like you did. My highly speculative explanation attempt is that the GPS device appears to unknowingly add some kind of “inertia” to the track, so that when you change direction, it takes a little moment for the device to account for this change and this creates a little deviation from the real location. I have had my fair share of frustration when trying to map zig-zag paths in forest areas…

In general, your tracks still look as precise as could be expected from a GPS device.

Kind regards, Hendric

Thanks also from me for this suggestion. I am actually a big fan of KeepRight and I fixed quite a number of occurrences in my region. I would like to see an integration of the KeepRight checking algorithm with the “report error” function in the basic OSM webpage. Just like they integrated OpenStreetBugs earlier.

Hello!

The tag “highway=track” should be used for any way that is usable at least by an offroad vehicle or tractor. If it’s to narrow for that, the tag “highway=path” is more appropriate.

You can classify track quality with the tag “tracktype=gradeX” where X is a number between 1 to 5. This allows you to distiguish asphalt tracks from uncondensed tracks using natural ground.

You can define the “ease of use” of hiking ways (paths or tracks) with the “sac_scale:value” tag, where “value” defines the skill level required to walk this way. See wiki for details.

You can include a “mtb_scale” tag for defining a difficulty rating of the way when using it with a bicycle.

I hope this helps! Hendric

Hallo Lokalhorst,

Danke für Deine nützlichen Kommentare! Ich habe den Nutzer freundlich angeschrieben und gleich noch die FF Perchtoldsdorf in Kopie gesetzt. Mal schauen was passiert.

Freundliche Grüße! Hendric

Hallo an alle! Vielen Dank für die nützlichen Kommentare! Basemap.at kannte ich noch nicht - ich habe es mir gleich mal in mein JOSM installiert. Schaut sehr gut aus und belegt, dass Bing in diesem Bereich kaum Versatz hat.

Ich mach dann mal weiter… Hendric

Eine vorbildliche Initiative der Stadt Troisdorf! Gratuliere!

Hallo!

Ich kann Deinen Ärger sehr wohl verstehen! Wenn ich irgendwo mappe, wo ich aus Zeit- oder Zugänglichkeitsgründen den Edit nicht ganz beenden kann, schreibe ich normalerweise einen Tag “fixme” - “Der weg geht noch weiter” (oder ähnlich) hinzu. So weiss jeder Nutzer, dass hier noch etwas verbessert werden muss. Wenn ich jedoch einen Edit vornehme, von dem ich weiss, dass hier schnell wer was verpfuschen kann (zB wenn Bing ein altes Bild hat, sich die Lage vor Ort aber inzwischen geändert hat), dann setze ich einen “note” Tag mit der passenden Erklärung.

Viel Spass beim Mappen! Hendric