The Himalaya will always hold a special place in my heart. I am still mapping in the area. What project did you have in mind?

Thank you for all the hard work. I am sure it’s hard to please everyone, and I think it’s good that barrier=kerb is not rendering the same as walls and fences, but I do think it’s useful to have it render. At some point I think we are going to need to map roads as areas, like we do with riverbank for rivers. I think mapping barrier=kerb is a good transition. At present it can give an idea of the with of roads, the existence of traffic islands, ease transition from manmade=bridge to the road mapped as a way, and probably more. In the future the traces could play a dual role of making the curb, and the extent of the roadway as an area.

It seems like having it render as a lighter grey line would keep it distinct from fences and walls, but keep this useful feature on the visual representation of our data.

For users of OSM? Sure, that’d be nice, but mostly, I’m just hoping to get there on holiday. :-)

The Kashmir Valley has come a long way since you posted this, I’m really happy how it’s looking these days. As a big chunk of editing was done by you and me I thought you’d be interested to see how it scored on this map that compares population density and OSM nodes. The valley looks really good, especially based on how little was mapped when you made this diary post.

Some interesting red blocks close to the Line of Control (de facto border with Pakistan), which I suspect is due to poor imagery being available, probably down to the Indian government not wanting the imagery to be available to militants crossing between the two countries.

Thanks for all your hard work in the area, it’s been great to see it shape up.

Thanks PlaneMad! It’s a meaningful complement coming from someone who’s done so much work in the area as you. dmgroom_ct has done way more work in the area (well… in Kashmir), than me, and I’m still focusing on the roads in J&K and HP, but it’s good to see the area coming along.

Welcome to the club, MerrynW! Thanks for your edits. I hope you like it here, and continue to contribute.

One resources I think new users can benefit from is Learn OSM. It is a great place to learn the basics of editing, and their more advanced articles go much further than the basics

Another good resource, for new editors and long time contributers, is the OSM wiki. It’s usually the first place I’ll look for info. If the wiki doesn’t answer your questions try posting it to the OSM help site.

I hope those look useful to you, and happy mapping.

For sure. I’ve also been mapping landuse=farmland, but have only done a tiny bit in that particular valley. In many parts of HP and especially J&K there are plenty of paved roads not yet mapped, so I’m trying to prioritize.

How could I access the MapMyIndia map? From their main website it didn’t seem obvious. Is it paywalled? I’d be interested in checking some of the areas I mapped, to see how they compare.

Thanks for your post @skippern those all look like real concrete suggestions that would be beneficial. The only alteration I’d make, and I have no idea if this would be feasible, would be to to supplement “4) A generic welcome message” with a non generic message sent by a human. I’ve been editing relatively actively since may of this year, and have not gotten any positive or negative feedback. I’m pretty sure I’m doing things right, but I’d be surprised if I’d not made any mistakes on the way. Your second point regarding area monitors would work well with sending a friendly greeting, I think a community project like this does benefit from social niceties that remind people are in a community of people.

As a new editor, I read your post with a great deal of interest. I can see that new editors have the potential to cause damage, but am not clear on what you propose as a solution, other than the rather vague idea that “OSM shifts it priority from gathering tons of new users to preserving the integrity of the map”.

I’m not sure what it is that OSM now does to gather tons of new users. Nor am I clear on what could be done to maintain the integrity of the map. You say both that the map needs protection but that we shouldn’t “heighten the barrier to becoming a contributor”. I’m not sure how these work together.

However, what is more important for me to know as a new editor is what can I do to avoid doing damage?