MInor Map Error

[NSquirrel]

How does one flag up a map error? (Perhaps this posting is enough?)

We walk through Eton, Berks, UK to Windsor at times, so looking at the route on Pocket Earth I noticed a marker to a school in South Wales. The marker is a ‘W’ on the junction of the B3026 and the B3022 as shown on the attached screen shot. The school itself, Cwrt Sart Comprehensive School is at Old Road, Briton Ferry, Neath, Neath, Port Talbot SA11 2ET South Wales.

Nick

[nounours]

Dear Nick,

I can not see the screen shot. But as I understand, your talking about a data error.
Or, all PocketEarth does is using OpenStreetMap data, and display it in a very sophisticated way.

So, if you see an error, and are not sure if it’s a PE problem (some times, data gets missed up by processing) or a real data problem in OSM, go to http://www.openstreetmap.org and check for the data there (please be aware that on OSM, the data is realtime, while PE has is delivering older data, so it might that there is an error still in PE, while it’s already corrected in OSM). When checking in OSM, please use the “question mark” sign on left buttom to check for detail information of the feature your interested in, or to show features not shown on the default OSM map.

If you realize that there is a problem, there are two options:

1) Best option is: get yourself a OSM-account and start contributing. Start with easy things, like correcting your error. There are 1 million people doing this all over the world, and it is really fun, and a lot of people get addicted. To not be scared, it looks sometime difficult, but you find a lot help information on wiki.openstreetmap.org and the community is ready to help.
Once you have an account, you probably best start to edit directly on http://www.openstreetmap.org, click “Edit map”, and go to “ID Editior”. Later you might want to do more serious stuff using JOSM.

2) If do not want to get too much involved, you can – without making a OSM-account – go to the OSM website and flag the error, and hope that some other volunteer will fix it. This is often done, but is obviously less efficient and less gratifying for you.

So take a look at:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Beginners%27_Guide
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/How_to_contribute

and have fun!

Nounours

[NSquirrel]

Thanks Nounours.

[NSquirrel]

Looking at it again, the problem relates to a Wikipedia entry. Hopefully the screenshot will now upload.

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[nounours]

Hi Nick,

Yes, I can see the screen shot now and see what you mean.

Yes, the “W” means Wikipedia entry. This means, this data is not coming from OSM (nor PE), but directly from Wikipedia. If you look under the article of the school,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cwrt_Sart_Comprehensive_School

you find there the coordinates of the school.
This coordinates are used by PocketEarth to put the “W” sign on the map and attach the Wikipedia-article-content into the info tab.

So, I assume that these coordinates are a bit wrong (the swart school is at 51.64328/-3.81594, while the Eton college is at 51.49181/-0.60931). If you want to correct them, this must be directly done in Wikipedia. There is a OSM-map in Wikipedia to make sure that you place the tag exactly on the right spot. There is, however, no data in OSM relating to Wikipedia-Articles on OSM (well, you can do the opposite: you can make point a node in OSM towards wikipedia, but as far as I know, this tags are not really used, at least not by PocketEarth. And do not make sense in my opinion).

So, somebody just did a typo – and you found it!!!

thanks, nounours

[nounours]

again …

sorry, you cannot correct it anymore – I already did it 🙂 this will be corrected on Pocket Earth next time PE will update Wikipedia entries …

But now you understood how it works, you can go out and fix / map one thousand other interesting things. There is still a lot to do!!!

Good luck, nounours

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[NSquirrel]

Thanks. Btw, I’m not looking for errors, but steadily understanding how pocket earth goes together with distributed info, so looking closely at what it does while I learn.

Having a great time using it to map our local walks and hence looking forward to tracking walks on holiday later in the year

[nounours]

Yes, I understand!

I also started there. When you find something you like – you map it, and have fun to be able to find it again sometime later.

But I’m convinced you will discover that, if you find something interesting, and you can share it with plenty of other people, this will even be much more fun. In the end, it’s OUR map.

So, I hope (and guess!) that you will soon be addicted as well !

🙂

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