Today I found out that it’s actually a lot easier to contribute to Open Street Map than I thought. There are some serious gaps in house addresses in my area and I was painstakingly using the built in browser editor in the browser.
But, you can use a FOSS app (available on fdroid) called StreetComplete that makes it a lot easier to help out filling in the gaps in your local map data.
It’s really fun - kind of like Pokémon Go but you are actually making an impact 😁
I don’t really know or use Open Street Map, so I wonder:
Can everyone just manipulate the map data? Is there some sort of control mechanism or is it easy to incorporate fake data?
I’m asking because this seems to be a really fallible concept, where people with malicious intents would have an easy way to disturb Open Street Map.
It is a wiki. While anyone can add fake data, there are monitoring tools to make sure that if someone does that, others will notice and remove it again.
Yes, but similar to Wikipedia (where the same holds true) the forces fo good and honest seem to prevail.
Even more than on Wikipedia. The problem with Wikipedia is it tries to use a wiki to write about contentious issues like politics, culture war, religion, national conflicts etc. too and wikis just aren’t a very suitable mechanism for that. OSM tries to limit itself to completely objective facts about the world, wikis are very well suited for that.