A devils advocate answer of course, I'm personally on the fence on the issue.

The solution, I think, would be a mandatory date field specifying when the data was accurate, and only allowing updates with more recent data.

That's the kind of thing that happens when someone is paid pennies per edit and given insufficient resources to guide those edits, which really only happens when someone points a hose of money at a contractor.

I've long been a fan of a mandatory time field! Now to get Stack Overflow to implement it too :)

Even at that time though, it seemed like the corporate support was, on balance, a positive thing. The main worry at that time (for me anyway) was some corp getting smart and pitching themselves as a middleman for other big corps. Luckily the contenders all got slurped up by big corps in a feast of mutually assured destruction, and since no one could trust their future to be built on a competitor's playground, they seem to have all defaulted to OSM.

Similar to Linux, having a diverse set of medium sized corps on your team (and maybe a few really big ones that see you as a complement, not a competitor) seems to be a winning strategy.

It's happened to me. Not just on maps, but on Wikipedia.

Same as the parent poster, I'm baffled. This article makes no sense to me. If it had a point to made, it buried it in thousands of words of blabbering.

I mean just look at them: https://i1.wp.com/thirdeyemom.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08...

How can Google map roads in the Americas with their terrible roads?

We don't make distinctions between any African countries anymore so I think it's only fair we start treating the other continents the same way.

(I mean of parts the US are close enough to third world countries anyways, 11 year olds dying in mobile homes because corrupt leaders hobbled basic utilities and all)

They're all the same sh*thole countries anyways with corrupt leaders full of murders and rapists right?

One let a TV clown run them into the ground, another is run by drug cartels, awful continent.

If I, a Ghanaian, have to constantly go by "African", then the US being lumped in with Hati shouldn't be inaccurate at all.

Weird you thought otherwise.

Canada - Canadians, Mexico - Mexicans, Brazil - Brazilians.

United States - ......United Statesians?

That's like people from the DRC calling themselves 'Democratic Republic of the Congolesians.' Nope, they just shortened it to Congolese. The United States of America just did the same thing. 'Americans.'

They all use it, and for the most part so do their neighbors.

Until some clever soul figures out a better way for the bologna of the North American sandwich to refer to it's citizens, the largest collection of English speakers on the planet will probably keep on trucking with the same boring term.

The point isn't there should be a word for it, the point is Africa is not a damn country. Such obvious facetiousness but thick skulls can only fixate on "wHuT amErIcAnS Are thE US"

South Africa has as much in common Sudan as the US has with Haiti

There are plenty of countries on the continent than can (and have been) mapped by Google Maps.

Saying that Africa is somehow inhospitable to Google Maps is exactly like acting like North America is inhospitable to Google Maps because Haiti has bad roads.

Hell I'd take driving on the roads in that Haiti picture over some in places like "Chiraq", probably less chance of a bad outcome in a Google Maps car.

Indians?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

United States - Total English Speakers: 283,160,411

India - Total English Speakers: 246,344,737

That being said I think the table is wrong because the numbers don't add up to the total and also don't match the source. Based on that census India should have only 12.18% of English speakers, not 22.18%, so you should be correct in any cases.

And I'm not sure what makes you think I'm not a native speaker of English.

Apparently you don't even understand blatant sarcasm, are you one?

I know it well.

> And I'm not sure what makes you think I'm not a native speaker of English.

You apparently don't know the definition of "American". I have never seen a native speaker make a mistake like that.

> Apparently you don't even understand blatant sarcasm, are you one?

I understand sarcasm just fine. Calling a Haitian road "American" is not sarcasm. Yes, English is my first and only language.

You said a picture was from the USA, and I doubted this, so I went and spent time chasing down the actual source. That's not facetiousness or sarcasm, that's either an innocent error, or misleading and antisocial. I interpreted it as innocent error, and attempted to politely correct your knowledge and explain, and now you reply with this argumentative comment, implying you deliberately attempted to mislead and waste our time. I won't reply further.

Person implies somehow Africa, the continent, is somehow unsuitable for Google maps vehicles (despite the fact Google has mapped hundreds of tens of thousands of miles in multiple countries in the continent)

This comes from treating all of Africa like it's one giant country with the same infrastructure everywhere.

I facetiously (a word you do NOT understand apparently) show a picture of Haiti, a North American country and say, since their roads are terrible all North American roads are terrible, and refer to an entire continent as if it were a single country that includes the US.

From here your subpar English skills fail you, to the point I'm forced to use a word somewhat similar to facetious but not quite as accurate (sarcasm) because the proper word is above your understanding.

Sometimes being imprecise allows a person with a challenged vocabulary such as yourself to catch up, but of course the Dunning-Kruger effect is in full force here, so you use it as an assertation that you're not the one failing to understand basic vocabulary.

It's a shame English is your only language and yet mastery of it escapes you.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation's governance [1] isn't tied to who contributes data. Is there any evidence they are being "corrupted" in any way at all by corporations adding data?

And like any open project, if its governance were captured by "bad guys", users can always fork it and "vote with their feet" since the data's open.

If OSM really was being subject to a hostile board takeover by corporations then obviously that would be hugely newsworthy and concerning. But it's like the article is trying to stoke fears of this while presenting zero actual facts to support it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_Foundation#Gover...

This is a very old strategy. Companies (especially the large, name-brand ones) aren't getting involved because they believe in the mission/objectives of OSM but rather that they see a strategic advantage in their involvement. They dip their toes in, get entrenched and then make their move. It's a lot faster and less expensive for them than trying to replicate what the project has produced.

And did the original contributors fork the project to a new successful initiative? Or if not, why not?

I'm also curious why companies feel the need for this -- if the data is all open in the first place, why do the companies even need to bother? Why don't they just use the data directly?

Without specific examples it's hard to understand.

That's not to say corporate involvement/sponsorship isn't important: it's vital to many important projects. The issue is when companies start trying to influence the projects beyond their technical needs and start trying to wrap their business model around them (a good indicator of that seems to be their involvement in governance) that the trouble starts. I think that's the concern being expressed about OSM.

One thing that happened when Pokemon Go got popular is that people (users) were conducting vandalism, in the sense that many pokemon figures were added to the main map of OSM. People have to work really hard to remove these, and they might burn out on this. There is already a lot of vandalism, like people adding their friends drinking shed, or whatever they think of as funny.

Another thing that already happens with volunteers, is people thinking their working area is "their area", while no such concept exists. This can already give a lot of friction among volunteers. I can imagine if billions in money are at stake, big companies with a massive crowd of emplyees might want to really grab those working areas and drown out volunteers. If that gets a big problem, volunteers that were active for years might drop out.

What'll often happen is a well-meaning person will come by, often using an editor that doesn't differentiate between types of bicycling, and change the route to be tagged highway=cycleway. This is the tag for things like paved bike paths, such as urban cycling infrastructure.

The result is now these mountain bike trails, narrow/rocky/tight/steep stuff, shows up in tools that offer bike commuters directions. Just... not great.

So many of us keep an eye on the stuff in our area to see that the tags stay as they should.

I don't know much about land-owners doing vandalism, often people try to communicate, sometimes this works out okay.

I don't know anything about mapping public Wifi access, like in shopping centres.

What I meant is that already some people feel like their city and a 30km radius around it is "their area" and they want to control what and how things get mapped there. It can lead to heated and emotional discussions, we are people after all :) If a big company with lots of human resources would do this, there is hardly any fighting back.