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by pietervdvn 25 days ago
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)

1 comments

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.