I had a look at Google Mapmaker as well (I'd not used it before either). Frankly, it seems a bit pants:
When trying to use it it asked me to "Please zoom in to browse features in the current map view" but on the same screen said "We are sorry, but we don't have maps at this zoom level for this region. Try zooming out for a broader look". Clearly something is wrong, but from reading the screen I've no idea what. The two strange buttons below the "browse" text on the map don't seem to do anything - presumably nothing has been added locally or I'm not allowed to edit here for some reason? There's an on-screen link that says "160+ countries editable in Google Map Maker" which goes to a page which lists about 100 (but not the UK or US), but DOES list them on a slippy map above? Attempting to outline a feature (Pride Park in Derby, England, FWIW) gives a "failed to create feature" error and a search of the site for that text offers no help. I presume what's happening is that they're using Google Mapmaker where they know that their existing maps are a bit rubbish - a quick check of Bulawayo suggests that that might be the case. That certainly seemed to have more roads and features than the OSM map of Bulawayo did - or at least it did until the browser page froze with a "loading..." message. Maybe something more akin to "openstreetbugs plus a simple guided way to add one feature at a time" should be integrated into OSM, but I wouldn't use GMM as an example except of what not to do! _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
