

Google Map Maker will be temporarily unavailable for editing - chippy
https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!category-topic/map-maker/news-and-announcements/crFEbGXJ-HI

======
anc84
If you love map editing and collaborating on better map data for the people,
[http://www.openstreetmap.org/](http://www.openstreetmap.org/) is available
for editing. You can choose from a multitude of editors, your edits are live
within minutes and everyone can benefit from your contributions. OSM is free
and open, you can download it all, you can do whatever you want with it, you
are not feeding a corporation that might or might not appreciate your
sacrifice.

~~~
liotier
Also, in return for your contributions, all you get from Google is a single
map rendering whereas Openstreetmap offers a multitude of them, the
possibility of making your own and the whole source data that Google will
never let you see but that you need for any sort of analytical processing or
joining with other datasets !

~~~
smackfu
For me, the big win in updating Google Maps is that it uses the updates when
routing directions. So now walking directions use the walking paths in our
complex, and our culdesac is properly shown as a one way loop rather than just
ending in a point.

~~~
anc84
Same with OSM based routers, there are several websites and apps available.
OSM is fantastic for walking and biking routing.

~~~
Fogest
Yes but none of them have as powerful of a navigation system, nor do they
usually account for traffic data which can be incredibly handy when deciding
which route to take to head home from work or school during rush hour.

~~~
danieldk
Certainly. But OSM allows you (or anyone else) to use their data, make a
startup or non-profit to implement such functionality.

Google Maps, in contrast is a data silo. Even if you put data in by
contributing it, it's Google's data. The possibilities to implement new ideas
on top of it is very limited.

As others say, the stuff that people do with OSM is terrific. E.g. you have
communities of mountainbikers who enter data about small paths, level of
difficulty in the uphill/downhill direction, etc. You can extract a MTB-
specific map out of it (which is exactly what openmtbmap does), which renders
on your GPS such that all relevant information for mountainbiking is there,
routing is adjusted such that you mainly use interesting paths, etc.

There are a gazillion other interesting applications that are not possible at
all with proprietary maps such as Google maps.

Also, these days, the point of interest annotations are better than nearly any
other map. Heck, in my area in Germany, even picnic tables, etc. are generally
in there.

~~~
Fogest
It really depends on how active your area is though. My area is very bare in
OSM. While I've added some stuff to it, it is really too much for one person.
It has gotten better I'll admit, but is still lacking.

I like OpenStreetMaps a lot, I just don't like the options for apps that are
out there.

------
buyx
I'm not a protectionist, but Google Maps has been damaging high quality local
mapping services because of its zero price-point. It is technically the best
mapping service, but when the data is wrong, it is very wrong, and, the bigger
the problems, the tougher it is to get them fixed, even using Map Maker.

After 2000, South African local governments were restructured. New
municipalities were created by amalgamating formerly separate towns. The
boundaries of those defunct towns are visible on Google Maps (as they should
be, as an aid to navigation, since the new municipalities are huge).

The problem is that the boundaries of these defunct amalgamated towns are
totally wrong on Google Maps, especially in the cases of the City of
Johannesburg, and Ekurhuleni Municipality. Suburbs like Emmmarentia and
Parkhurst in Johannesburg are supposedly in Randburg according to Google Maps,
and this leads to enormous confusion when looking up addresses. Similarly, the
boundaries of Bedfordview in Ekurhuleni are wrong. Trying to fix these
boundary issues is futile, because one has no idea what criteria are used in
moderation, and it takes a very long time to do these fixes, only to risk
having them rejected.

Google needs to invest more in Maps, rather than trying to get away on the
cheap with half-baked crowdsourcing, and it needs to make sure that it
responds to error reports quickly and transparently.

~~~
paganel
Three of four years ago GMaps used to display as open and operating a highway
linking my city (Bucharest) to another city 40 miles away. The problem was
that that highway was in no way open nor operating, as it was still under
construction. I completed that "this-place-is-wrong"-form describing the issue
and received a message back saying that bla-bla-bla the map is correct and I
am wrong. That only increased my reliance on trusted paper maps from that day
on.

~~~
SeanDav
This reminds me of a similar problem with wikipedia. A well known celebrity
(Author I think) noticed that his birth date was incorrect. He tried to get it
changed, even stating that he was the actual person and knows his own birthday
- only to have it rejected as not from a good enough source!

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detaro
Maybe the way Microsoft is doing it really is the better one: give resources
to OpenStreetMap and let them take care of the community work. Both sides win.

~~~
maxerickson
Does Microsoft use OSM data for anything?

They provide a lot of server resources by allowing OSM to reference Bing
satellite/aerial imagery, but I've never seen any direct use of the data (they
could certainly be using it ways that are not obvious).

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Famously they used the outlines of military areas, as mapped in OSM, to decide
where to blur their satellite imagery...

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bitL
This is probably one of the worst responses Google could take - who is going
to enjoy waiting weeks/months for their change to be reviewed and added to a
map when the whole point of community editing was to enable near-realtime
changes to map observed by people living in the area? Throwing out the baby
with the bath water. One prank and the whole community suffers beyond
reasonable limits.

~~~
vesinisa
If they allow unreviewed community edits to the map, why don't they also allow
users to revert changes by others? This is how Wikipedia deals with vandalism
at least.

~~~
jpatokal
Wikipedia's policy is radically open as far as these things go, and only works
because a) they're willing to tolerate vandalism being public for short (and,
sometimes, long) periods of time, and b) they have an insanely large dedicated
army of volunteers maintaining it.

------
Fogest
Everyone is suggesting OSM here, but I am confused how OSM is any better at
keeping out these kinds of spam based edits, especially if it is someone who
has made a lot of edits? From what I have seen it would be open to the same
kind of problem.

~~~
andor
OSM probably has a much larger community of editors. Both in absolute numbers
and as a share of the users.

Because OSM is a community project, editors are more likely to feel
responsible for map quality. On Map Maker, users also have limited
possibilities once they find problems. I once tried to undo a malicious edit,
and as far as I can remember my only options were to comment on it, and to
"report a problem".

~~~
Fogest
Do you have a stat for this? Map maker seems much more know and to have a
rather large community based on the Google product page. If anything I'd think
the community is much larger for the Google project than it is for OSM.

~~~
andor
I was guessing.

The only user number I can find for Map Maker is 25000 in 2013, but there's no
reference and it's not clear how many of those are active.
[http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-map-maker-
vs-o...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-map-maker-vs-
openstreetmap-id-editor/)

OSM currently has 1% active and 2 million registered users:
[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Stats](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Stats)

So at least in relative numbers, OSM should have more contributors.

------
JosephRedfern
This was posted yesterday, too - previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519535](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519535)

------
clockwerx
I think that [http://tasks.hotosm.org/](http://tasks.hotosm.org/) has the
balance of edit, review down pat.

------
daw___
More on the 'most recent incident':
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9432504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9432504)

------
graemian
Major strategic blunder: the whole world was updating their proprietary map
data for them, but they failed to engineer the process to be spam-proof. Now
they've had to stop accepting contributions as a result. Many contributors are
likely to switch to updating someone else's map data, and Google risks no
longer having the most up-to-date maps of the entire planet. Larry Page needs
to kick some ass.

~~~
smackfu
>they failed to engineer the process to be spam-proof

That's a bit naive. They have been getting business spam constantly from the
day they opened. Like businesses marking their competitors as closed, or
moving their own location so it is closer to their customers.

------
nkozyra
'This is why we can't have nice things'

~~~
learnstats2
Why, exactly?

Is it because Google asked for a bunch of free work to support its commercial
interests without providing any oversight at all? And now they won't provide
the resources to fix their problem?

Doesn't it seem likely that one of Google's goals here was just to compete
with and thus extinguish existing free services? Is that why we can't have
nice things?

~~~
JustSomeNobody
I'm curious, now that you've mentioned it.

There's clearly evidence to support us not having nice things because of
childish pranks.

Where's the evidence to support Google's goal was just to extinguish free
services?

Do you have any links or anything to show what you mean?

~~~
Fogest
I am pretty sure that was a baseless argument just to hate on Google.

------
Achshar
How awesome would it be if all the big players contributed their effort to one
open source platform. Much like how WC3 works. Everyone would benefit from the
work they do and they can instead compete on the features or the front end
they provide to their users. If google moves their data to openstreetmap then
everyone stays up to date including google.

~~~
rmc
OSM will eventually overtake Google Maps and others, so I predict GMaps will
eventually use OSM.

Importing GMaps data into OSM would be a programming nightmare, and is
basically never going to happen. Trying to merge those 2 databases! Yikes!

~~~
Piskvorrr
Programming would be the lesser of the nightmares involved: merging whatever
_n_ databases that Google has (licensed under _something_ , only Google knows
what), with ODbL-licensed OSM data would be the real nightmare. Opening closed
data is always a pain.

~~~
rmc
Licencing can be solved by the correct person in authority signing a bit of
paper. Merging millions of roads in OSM with millions in GMaps?

~~~
Piskvorrr
That's the programmers' equivalent of "any matter programming can be solved by
a smart person typing on a computer for a little while, there's nothing to
it."

That said, I do acknowledge that merging two global datasets would be a
nightmare.

------
Demiurge
This is not a new problem. You just cant trust an individual, even with a long
history. The solution is to have individuals check up on each other. If some
users are interested in drawing, other users should be interested in
moderating.

~~~
icebraining
And then you end up with the interminable whining regarding the moderation -
see Wikipedia, StackExchange, etc.

~~~
rmc
OSM has less whining, probably because there is often less amibugity. Someone
on StackExchange might wonder if a question is _really_ off-topic, but on OSM,
there'll be very little disagreement about whether the thing is a lake or a
postbox.

~~~
Piskvorrr
OSM is helped by the On The Ground Rule, in other words, physical world is the
canonical source. There's quite enough disagreement in secondary tags (e.g.
"smoothness" of a way), but having a universal canonical source (whatever is
physically there) helps immensely with conflicts between data sources
(sometimes from three data sources, you can get five data points, neither of
which matches the physical feature ;)).

[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputes#On_the_Ground_R...](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputes#On_the_Ground_Rule)

------
fnordfnordfnord
It was practically unavailable in my area anyway. I'd already grown tired of
fixing some really bad errors on the maps surrounding my neighborhood and
workplace only to have the fixes reverted by someone or something else.

------
sebgeelen
I wonder how the edits could be pre-review by an image analysis tool, that
will auto detect if the submitted path is a text or a logo. Might speed up the
manual process.

~~~
anc84
The Android pissing on Apple was created step by step with shapes that by
itself looked totally clean. This would not work.

~~~
mcintyre1994
Sort of. Here's their list of edits:
[http://www.google.com/mapmaker?gw=66&ptab=1&uid=200619129451...](http://www.google.com/mapmaker?gw=66&ptab=1&uid=200619129451972425213&start=10&sort=)
(should be page 3), the Apple at the bottom would be reasonable to expect a
human to catch. Not so much for a logo seeking algorithm, but it's not a clean
simple shape. On page 4 the android head stands out too, again a human
moderating could be expected to spot that.

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beyti
For the people who didn't know the related prank like me, which led to this
result: here is a quick summary about it:
[http://techaeris.com/2015/04/24/google-android-mascot-
shown-...](http://techaeris.com/2015/04/24/google-android-mascot-shown-on-
google-maps-urinating-on-apple/)

------
mukundmr
It is a welcome move if they are able to figure out a solution to retain
quality. This problem exits more prominently in Google translate where people
game the system and I guess that the translation is supposed to correct itself
over a period of time with people fixing the mistake.

