Improving the OSM map - why don’t we? (13)

### Why so many people are not using OSM. Do you recognize the renderer that was used for the above screenshot? I’m pretty sure you can’t. Because it wasn’t rendered but printed in the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World.
Looking at this map, it is clear (at least to people who are familiar with “paper” maps [1]) what we see:
* A number of Islands that have a name as a group (Canary Islands) that are part of mainland Spain
* Each Island has its own name (printed in italics or bold italics)
* Each Island has a capital (printed in bold, but this is not true for all the Canary Islands)
* A number of towns is printed in normal type

Now let’s see how OSM based maps and renderers show this to the world. The same Islands, with three different ways of rendering (Humanitarian, Mapquest and Mapnik).
The most striking omission (to me) is, that none of the islands is shown with their name and Mapnik shows every Island as “España”.
Even when zooming in, the names of the Islands never (and I mean NEVER) show up (I’m supposed to see Tenerife now somewhere on the map):

Now, what kind of a map is that?? Not showing what is most important!?!
Is there a road (top picture) running from Santa Cruz de Tenerife to España?
When I use a (printed) map or atlas, I can see at the large scale maps (1:500.000) what I need to find my way. At that scale I’m not interested if there is a paved/unpaved way ahead of me. And even less I do care about the traffic signs that I might see once I’m there.

I know that everything I’m looking for (and much, much more) is in the OSM database, but why is it shown to me at the wrong moments (if at all) and at the wrong zoom levels?
BTW, Google maps is not doing much better than OSM, showing (some) Island names at high zoom levels.
Do I use OSM myself? Yes!! All the time, and because I have learned to ignore all the crap it is giving me (like showing me the map in Chinese when viewing China, even if English is the language I have installed as my basic language), and because I know the strength it has with the right tools, to me it is the perfect map.
But to a lot of people who are used to a regular printed map or to Google, OSM is just a funny experiment that you can’t even use decently on a mobile phone.
Of course, there are tools and apps that use the OSM data in a much more user-friendly way (especially on mobile devices), but why can’t openstreetmap.org be a bit more user friendly?

One more example of the incompleteness of OSM.
In the part of the map I’m showing you here, we are supposed to see the capitals of the UK (London), France (Paris), Belgium (Brussels), Luxemburg (Luxemburg) and Holland (Amsterdam). Can you spot them?

Even worse, at this zoomlevel the only capitals shown on the map are London, Dublin and Budapest!!
Madrid, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Luxemburg, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, Oslo, Kopenhagen, Stockholm? What?? Where?? Are they gone??

Friends I’m trying to move over to use OSM (by pointing them to my own openpoimap, I often tell, they call it a “slippy-map”, but you better consider it a “shitty-map”.

I hope that the developers who are working on the way the basic map is being presented to the users, read this and try to create a map that users recognize instead of being puzzled.
I have said it before, at this moment OSM is a map for mappers, not for users.

[1] Of course there are people who have never seen or used a printed map before, and for those OSM is maybe a great tool, but I doubt it.