Out of interest, where did 2000 accounts go across the new year?

As far as anyone knows, it was working correctly.

Such as … ?

If they’re anything like the equivalents in the UK, then they will protect consumer contracts only and won’t extend to our terms since we are not in the business of offering consumer contracts.

Hmm. On the plus side, that area looks better than it did in 2006. We’ve lost some data, we’ll gain more data down the line. OSM life continues as normal.

have you ever accounted for the fact that maybe the people making errors are just new to OSM and not just ‘brainless’ as you seem to think

Goodness, some people really are stupid. I “seem to think” because I actually looked to see who was adding those names to make sure they weren’t new.

I simply do not accept the fact that using locator to add otherwise nameless roads is wrong.

Whatever. You’re free to not accept that water is wet if that suits you. Using Locator to add a name is wrong - end of story. Here, we prefer correct over complete. We’d rather someone add hundreds of names that are all right rather than thousands that could be wrong.

Lots of StreetView names are wrong too are we to discount that?

Yes. If I want a clone of StreetView, I’ll use StreetView. StreetView is decent enough for geometry if you have no alternative, but it should not be used for names (which will be duplicated in Locator anyway). There’s no margin when it comes to names. Geometry can be improved, but a name is either correct or not correct.

Bing images may be misaligned and out of date. Discount that too?

Misaligned and out of date are not a problem if you have enough local knowledge to recognise it. Misaligned is also not a problem if there’s enough data in the area to realign it. A bigger problem is that the imagery often isn’t rectified - we’ve seen an example of this in the diary recently, and I’m aware of at least one part of the world where they actively avoid tracing from Bing for this very reason.

The shoreline might change, don’t ever trace that?

Correct. The shoreline visible in an aerial image taken at a non-specific point in the tidal cycle is meaningless, and anyone who is tracing it away from sheer cliff faces should be taken out and shot. That’s one place where the OS data comes in useful. Unfortunately, some people have done silly things such as tracing it from StreetView instead of importing the vectors from BoundaryLine or VectorMap. These are useful imports because we’ve got no other way of obtaining these.

Streets are renamed, business change, even house numbers change.

Now you’re just being facetious. This is an area where we have substantially outperformed the traditional mapping agencies.

but in the meantime, I think using the hundreds of years worth of work the OS have done seems a reasonable stop gap.

That’s just incredibly lazy. Again, we’re not looking for complete data, we’re looking for correct data. We’re in no rush. We have all the time in the world to “finish” our task, so a quick fix of importing a bunch of data that we could reasonably collect through other means doesn’t really help us much. OS data is a supplement to user-contributed data, not a replacement for it. If you find this “insulting”, then perhaps OSM really isn’t for you.

You seem to misunderstand what OSM is about. You also seem to have misunderstood my point. I’m not saying that tracing is wrong, I’m saying that tracing from StreetView and then adding the name from Locator is wrong. We’re not a dumping ground for any and all data you happen to find. The idea is that people use Locator in addition to, not in lieu of, local knowledge. The purpose of the comparison tools is to tell us where we may be missing something, and to enable us to tell the OS when they get things wrong. I’ve seen some names in Locator that were patently gibberish. I’ve seen others that were obvious typos that were actually transferred onto the map. These are actively harmful to the project, not least because we have no way of finding them. FWIW, I can tell you from experience that when it comes to Locator, “MAY have a tiny amount of error in it” is a gross understatement - there are some 7000 errors in Locator that we know about (where someome has seen the name is wrong, and then correctly added a not:name tag to flag it), and surely many more that we don’t know about.

Ultimately, before they go near the map, any source of data has to be filtered through a brain. Any process that by-passes this is wrong ab initio.

What if they’re not tagged with “survey” or “local_knowledge” as a source? Are you going to replace possibly correct data with possibly incorrect data?

Please don’t use unhelpful measures such as some made-up “completeness” figure. It’s a statistic useful for comparison, nothing more. We have some names wrong, the OS also have some names wrong. I had one silly person around me trace roads from StreetView and add the names from Locator. They denied it, however, there were a fair number of things they added which couldn’t have come from anywhere else (typos preserved, names with no ground presence and no residential property, non-existent roads added).

No, it isn’t. The speed of light is certainly more than 299792458 km/h.

Like any large society, OSM is a wonderfully diverse place. Unfortunately, one must take the rough with the smooth, which means occasionally dealing with someone who has a massive stick up their rectum.

As much as some might like it to be, nothing is really mandatory on OSM.

IMO the bus lane would only need to be separate if it can make some movement that general traffic can’t, and it would appear that all traffic can turn right there.

It’s a start, but there’s still a lot of nonsense on the western approach. Unless the area has been substantially reworked, I find it hard to believe the carriageway physically separates into four parts. Separate ways for lanes has long been considered bad form.

Aargh! My eyes! What’s going on there? Separated ways that aren’t separate, buildings with nodes in them, buildings that don’t match the imagery, oh my. People who create ways such as this should probably be taken out and sh^H^H re-educated.

What time were the Bing images taken?

Be careful with coastlines - unless you’re dealing with cliffs or a sea wall (where low tide and high tide will be in the same place) then you may just be replacing one lot of incorrect data with another lot of incorrect data.

Disk space is cheap-ish (not at cheap as it once was, but blame Seagate or WD for that). Don’t really see why anyone would complain. (After all, if an edit is problematic, it can be reverted wholesale.)

For future reference, the correct procedure when you find bad data is to Just Fucking Fix It. If anyone gets in your way, remind them that while you admire their principles, they have a massive stick up their arse and they’re getting in the way of you Just Fucking Fixing It. Corollary: writing long diary entries, creating lots of diagrams, and Rule 7 violations in general also detract from Just Fucking Fixing It. (As does writing lengthy responses in the comments.)

If you’re looking to create an application using tiles offline, then consider redering your own or using another provider, rather than directly using the tiles that appear on our front page. They’re mainly intended as a demonstration, and as an aid to our mappers. Take a look at switch2osm.org for more information on this.

Entirely unofficial answer: I’d assume that they’ll be produced on the same basis as before, after the technical work for the licence change is complete.

As far as I can see, they are there. Where are you looking?

What nonsense. Keep reading. Scroll down a bit. Oh, look, there’s the proposed timetable.

(With apologies to marscot for clogging up the diary entry further.)