[wraptile]

What FOSS maps need is user generated content. For example, having "swimming spot" on my map is not really that useful - it needs photos, some description, additional information of what it actually is and how to reach it as bare minimum to be actually competitive.

OSM argues that it's a "map database" but it stores labels like "opening hours" and "social media links" - why stop there? The UGC vs non-UGC debate has been the biggest crutch of all open map projects and no one managed to solve it yet.

[zbycz]

You can already add photos to OSM database. Eg. via wikimedia_commons tag.

There is already plenty of apps which show them, like OsmAnd or https://cartes.app , https://osmapp.org or https://openclimbing.org where you can even upload the photos from the map UI

[wraptile]

Thanks! The wikimedia_commons tag is very useful - I'll start contributing there. Though my point still stands that UGC integration could and should be much better.

[szszrk]

I strongly disagree. Open maps don't have to compete in this space and it would make them worse.

Yes, that is something google maps excels in. Absolutely. But trying to compete here would mean they have to shift into being a social media and their biggest effort would be content moderation.

There are some intermediate options here. Osmand integrates Mapilary images (I'm not a fan personally), they have travel guides built in (they became usable now, even small cities have decent descriptions where I live) and tiny things like that.

On the other hand, OSM-based tools are crushing commercial maps in... being a map ;)

[wraptile]

> shift into being a social media and their biggest effort would be content moderation.

I really don't buy this argument. You already have to moderate submissions - what's an extra field? Sure, UGC is more opinionated but just don't add star ratings and anything that promotes gaming of system. Just let users expand the dataset with more information, it's almost never a bad idea - isn't that entire point of crowdsourcing datasets?

[szszrk]

> what's an extra field?

That is not a flag "is the crossing wheelchair accessible?".

It's user created picture or text. This can be any kind of content, abusive, regulated by law, spam, subjective for chat control "age verification" controls, copyrighted and so on.

Moderation is a hard topic. Only very small communities can do that well.

[fizwidget]

To be fair there are examples of freeform text tags in OpenStreetMap already, e.g. “description”.

[szszrk]

Which is hard to get to, doesn't even render on some apps at all, it's easier to automatically or manually moderate as it has a more defined purpose and it's pure text (not meant for personal feelings towards the place, not meant for rating etc).

Absolutely, can be abused. But there can be thousands of reviews of a pizza place, with text, surprising languages, slang, pictures... But only one description.

[lukan]

"Just let users expand the dataset with more information, it's almost never a bad idea"

Thanks for the laugh.

[pietervdvn]

The big difference is visibility and scale.

Sure, a 'description' or 'name' tag can contain something inappropriate (like a slur of defamation). If it has high impact, it'll be reverted quickly. If it has little impact, not a big deal. Many tools don't even show the 'description' tag

Pictures are a whole other level. You need to blur faces and license plates. What if someones house is photographed? How to detect inappropriate images? Should one study the laws of all countries? Even the freedom of panorama contains many differences between European countries, let alone privacy rights, ...

[mid-kid]

I don't really need a tag saying how to reach the place, but better public transport support would go a long way. I also have this issue with places marked as parkings, to determine whether they're public, open or even reachable.

[pietervdvn]

The OSM foundation strictly keeps it with 'map data'. There are however many other, small projects that fill in the gap; for example 'Panoramax' for streetview imagery or lib.reviews for reviews. I've made a webapp that ties those services together (https://mapcomplete.org)

Keep in mind that Google Maps has a >1 billion yearly budget (citation needed, but other global maps have similar budgets)

[Ajedi32]

Yeah a lot of these features exist, they're just very fragmented, which given that the OSM community is already pretty small makes it almost impossible for them to reach the critical mass necessary to actually be useful.

You can go look up pretty much any tiny, hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Google Maps and there'll be dozens of user-contributed pictures of the interior, the menu, etc, but on OSM you'll be lucky if the opening hours are accurate.

I'm not sure there's a good solution to this, but certainly more OSM front ends exposing the data and contribution tools to end users helps.