OpenStreetMap
As a cartographer I was aware of Openstreetmap and how it started as a way to break Ordnance Survey’s hold on copyright and to free up mapping for small cartographic companies and freelancers with a copyright free map of the world.
It was quite a while after I retired that I took a look at Openstreetmap (May 2013) and started mapping around where I lived using Potlach. I realised how incomplete the mapping was with inconsistency throughout. Looking around other parts of the world I realised just how much of the world just did not have any basic mapping at all. I realised that to achieve a consistent coverage of basic mapping throughout would take years of work by lots of mappers. I saw that some had tried mass imports which made me shudder. I know how much work it takes to fix up some of the material we had bought in just to correct it and bring it up to a standard for us to use in our reference atlases. I also noticed the problems with rendering on the map itself. Map symbols were used randomly without proper structure, for example a line with a peck and dot was used in administrative boundaries and in highways, both with an array of colours. It would have been more prudent to have set aside the peck and dot line in varying combinations and boldness with the single colour purple for administrative boundaries. Thus anything on the map in Purple would be an admin boundary and the more bold it was would indicate it’s higher admin level. That would have made them easily identifiable on the map and the map user would not be continually trying to find a list of symbols to know what they are looking at. And then I realised that I was thinking Conventional Cartography …. and OSM was definitely not Conventional. I had to adjust my thinking to be able to fit in with OSM.
Discussion
Comment from imagico on 18 January 2017 at 17:48
What you describe is probably in large parts an experience many people with a background in classic cartography share.
Regarding the purple boundaries - this is something a lot of people are dissatisfied with in the standard style, but it is not easy to change. But the good thing is of course that not all OSM based maps have purple boundaries so anyone who does not like them can easily find a map without these.
I don’t think in map design there is a clear division between conventional cartography and OSM regarding what works well design wise and what does not. The main difference are the circumstances - the lack of a central authority, the world wide coverage, the heterogeneity and generic nature of the data and the need for real time updates in rendering for example. In my experience much of the difficulty of conventional cartographers in ‘getting’ OSM is related to the difficulty to comprehend these differences and what they mean.
Comment from Warin61 on 18 January 2017 at 20:50
The advantages of OSM are many. There are some disadvantages too!
The Data
Uncoordinated .. yes … unpaid individuals all doing their own thing gets you this. However most of them are well intended. First the tagged/encoding itself has grown like topsy, off in all sorts of directions. Secondly the entered data … each mapper has their own mapping desires and so they map that leading to some things well represented while others are sparse if not missing altogether.
The Rendering
The response here is usually ‘do your own’. Certainly there are a large array of choices available of already rendered maps. Most people initially want something the same as the maps they are used to using … based on habit and present knowledge.