The assertion that Chinese government actors are editing with OSM directly seems unlikely and hasn’t been reported previously anywhere. https://www.google.com/search?q=china+%22openstreetmap%22&hl=en&biw=1536&bih=754&tbm=nws&sxsrf=AOaemvKBTLPS1pPNllYnWFBuvthCdfEW7g%3A1632673752595&ei=2J9QYYnUI_WO9u8PhMyb8AQ&oq=china+%22openstreetmap%22&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i30k1j0i8i30k1l4.5877.6995.0.7188.2.2.0.0.0.0.152.245.1j1.2.0….0…1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.2.241…0i22i30k1.0.mz-kH5_9lN8

Even if it was the case, why would it matter where someone is based or what their ideology is, as long as their edits improve the map. Users that break OSM rules should obviously be warned and banned if needed. Should we object if Kim Jong-Un himself is micromapping Seoul to prepare an attack? Those could still be useful edits. If you put the boundary issues to the side, isn’t it great that mappers put so much effort in mapping a remote section of the Himalaya?

Once the politically motivated editors take control of OSM (there are signs this happening already) the project will lose any checks and balances over the quality of the map in China.

The ‘quality’ of the map is decided by the local community, if the local community tends to be nationalistic then so be it. If the local community decided to import low quality road data, which could be argued as degrading the quality of the map then so be it as well. If the local community wants to remove military areas, then that was ok too. Regarding the tagging of Xinjiang camps, tagging is decided by the local community. Hence if a community decides that certain types of prison should be tagged as schools, why should administrators intervene, as long as and verifiable data such as their (common) name and location remain present. Data users will still be able to find these objects and tag them according to their own interpretation. Ironically people have raised the complaint that Chinese mappers are modifying data overseas, while simultaneously objecting against Chinese users modifying data added by overseas users within China.

Thanks for all your efforts, it’s amazing how much information you captured and added to osm.

The filename from imagico shows that it’s just from Sentinel-2 which you can process yourself to use as a background in OSM.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Ff5722/Using_Sentinel-2_imagery

Maybe this is mostly a problem in very active mapping communities. Most new mappers never get any feedback, even with review_requested=yes. That could also be demotivating, OSM is supposed to be a community project, but often it’s each to their own, just drawing on what was imported or drawn years ago.

When I’m tracing stuff the hours fly by, so it’s certainly a good way to spend time. Plus the satisfaction that your contributions will help others save time and frustration when travelling and allow for research on geographic features.

I’ve never encountered any errors or warning from the 3dshapes import in the Netherlands

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/3dShapes

@Glassman HOT makes tasks in areas with few active local mappers. After the HOT task is over, the area is mostly abandoned. The contributions through HOT are also highly concentrated, making solving the mistakes an gargantuan task. Together, this means that these mistakes will remain on the map for years, in this case, since 2013.

The quality of the road data added is pretty much worthless too, in the time it takes to classify the roads, fix crossings, extend roads, simplify or detail curves etc, i could easily redraw the road network from scratch.

If you could give the WMTS link from the Mapbox style it can be used as a background layer in JOSM (for iD, Leaflet works). Then it’s easy to download that area from OSM right away.

There are some additional tags for recognized heritage sites, which could be used to easily combine data. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:heritage#Tags_to_use_in_combination

But this is optional, so no need to worry about this too much.

There’s a simpler way to fix the JOSM bug.

Just click the ‘Edit’ button for the Tag/Memberships box by mouse, then close the window by mouse again. Now all keyboard actions should work again.

@Mikelatham No it’s not blocked, in fact there are several dozens of active contributors based in China. Just don’t go out photographing stuff with a map or GPS tracker in the hand and police won’t care (as long as you don’t stray near military objects).

@SimonPoole It’s easy to trace due to the straight roads, but also kind of a boring task. And not helped by the fact that the chance of anyone travelling these roads guided by OSM data will be extremely slim for many years to come. I did some countryside detailing on a few other places in China, for example here and here. The result is quite satisfying, but with entire suburbs being built in a few years span and 10,000 km of motorway being newly built each year, most of us don’t prioritize mapping these minor roads. Of course, everyone is free to do what they want, and it’s unique to OSM that there are villages in the middle of Africa with all their buildings mapped, and villages in Germany without any.

@AntiEntropy I know some Chinese, and in some cases i was able to confirm the religion through search, but of course some small village temples have no presence online.

Good to see more active mappers in China by the way!

People without contributions to the map have zero reason to be allowed to write diary entries I think. Help questions can be asked on the forum or on help.openstreetmap.org. Companies that want to announce news about OSM could be whitelisted by the admins.

This query will give all the named streets without a Spanish name: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/p7c

I handpicked a few and checked the history but I couldn’t find any case where the Spanish name was removed later. I haven’t been to the area, so I wouldn’t know if all streets have a Spanish name. Hopefully the Spanish community will notice this post and add Spanish names where applicable.

If you have an Android phone with root, you could use Xposed to force the language for only one app: http://repo.xposed.info/module/de.robv.android.xposed.mods.appsettings

However I think apps should allow the user to choose a locale independent of the system language.

@Vincent de Phily I understand, but remember that in many places there is no high-res Bing or Mapbox imagery. Tracing from lower res imagery is also very rough, as is trees, fields, orchards and even lakes can all have a dark shade of green.

So maybe it could still be useful for remote areas which are surely covered by forests (e.g. Siberia, central China, Amazon rainforest), but which are too really a boring task to trace by human mappers.

Are you sure it can only be done by the lakewalker algorithm? Because this data is forests only, so the pixel values could be directly converted to contour lines of the ‘forest probability value’. At least, that is what I would think with my limited experience in data processing.

The thing is that Google can use OSM data without paying a penny, so if this were true, it would even be generous to give back.

In fact, Chinese Baidu maps already uses OSM data, meanwhile it is technically prohibited to contribute to OSM in China 🙄

There’s an editor that can add any data (allows free tag input), but which is simpler than Vespucci: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.geothings.osmtools

It is not possible to download data though, except for some areas (mainly Taiwan) which were pre-processed by the developer.

or you could just be considerate and comment on the changeset that was reverted.

A user has added Vietnamese names to all major administrative divisions in China. http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/nqq

Same (by another user) for Japanese names. http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/nqr

In various imports, an automatically generated name:en was added to the imported places in China, from tiny village to city. http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/nqs

I think more than half of all villages (72,000) on OSM in China have a name:en, of which maybe a few hundred at most have an accepted transliteration. Personally I’m also guilty in this, however I can read the Chinese mostly myself… So far I found there are only a few places where the ‘automatic’ transliteration to English doesn’t work well, which is in Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia (where the English name is usually based on the respective region’s minority language) and places where the Chinese name is also pronounced different from standard pronounciation. E.g. 六安 is not Liu’an but Lu’an. “Although the character “六” (literally: “six”) is normally pronounced “Liù”, in this case it changes to “Lù” on account of the local dialect.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu%27an)

The only way to stop this is when commonly used renders (OSM Carto, MAPS.ME, Mapbox, Mapquest, etc) will do automatic transliteration. Until then I think it’s actually justifiable to add them as tags, however pollution of the database with incorrect transliterations is indeed a huge problem. As long as the transliterations themselves are indisputable and use an official transliteration, they are not incorrect and thus not really tagging for the renderer.

I think it’s somewhat similar to tracing roads from satellite in an area you have not visited. Strictly speaking you should draw everything as highway=road. But if you see that one road only gives access to a small village and the other road clearly is a wide through road, is it wrong to add classifications until someone with local knowledge checks it? If you don’t give classifications, your road network is pretty useless for routing. If you do give classifications, you risk doing it wrong.