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Top-level
 There are different kinds of imports. Safest are those done by hand, but also the dirtiest, in my opinion: it's easy to miss or to get lazy and just press upload. For towns and villages, the best source we had was GNS, an american database of toponyms. I converted it to OSM format and wrote a short manual on copying it onto the map: Interesting that while box=yes parameter doesn't work on osm.org nowadays, parameters minlat, maxlat etc still do. 22 comments
Having a GeoJSON to preview an import is good, but how to suggest amendments? That's why I made CF Audit: an interactive website to go through changes one by one, cross-reference them, and fix anything wrong. Those fixes are kept for consequent imports with OSM Conflator, so less work next time. I know RocketData iterated on it for their operations, and there's a new IFS fork by @sfkeller team: https://cfauditgui.geoh.infs.ch/ So I got the conflator, and I got the audit tool, and the entire pipeline as shown on the picture. Did I use it? Oh did I even. 5k Walmart supermarkets, tens of thousands Shell fuel stations, ~10k addresses in Moscow, various restaurant and shop chains... It all worked perfectly. Of course it was just a few imports. I envisioned an automated system for high volume of data, still controllable by OSMers, but nobody asked for that, and I didn't have time. Still, mentioned it at SotM EU 2023. You know OpenWhateverMap. Grant made the original version, then we lost the domain, and then I updated it with modern tiles and some interactivity: clicking on a tile reveals its name and URL. For the @sotm in Firenze I went all-out with the remote participation part. One thing I did was a Telegram bot, where people from anywhere could introduce themselves. The idea was to put a face to hundreds of names on online channels. Because once you have a face and a voice attaches to words, it's impossible not to feel a proper conversation going when you type. Not many people contributed, but still, was fun. The bot was disabled after the conference ended of course. For a very long time the leading repository on my github was "leaflet-grayscale" with a hundred stars. I love @leaflet and made too many plugins for it. This one was quite simple — but I guess useful enough. It just makes the map grayscale. There are too few layers fit for a visualization background. Sometimes removing colors (and labels if possible) is good enough.  Back to OSM, here's one you'd ban if you could. Sisyphus make a person's mapping work as pointless as rolling a stone up a mountain. It plain reverts every changeset a person uploads to OpenStreetMap. We used it in Maps.Me for reverting edits of our QA team. Not ideal, which Frederik noted, but it works, the map is clean, no hassle with moving data to the sandbox. Uses simple_revert as a library, of course. That library is underrated. People usually need three things from maps: tiles, geocoding, and routing. Three things too mundane to work on. For Maps.Me Changes Monitoring, I filtered edits by countries. For that I wrote a simple reverse geocoder: QueryAt. It returns a country, a region, and a populated place for a given location. 3 GB database for the entire world, no configuration or query parameters. Won't recommend using it now though: 8 years later, you could do better.   |
Gregory's Server
@zverik Still loads of redundant GNS tags on place nodes in Ireland (probably imported by Dermot - mackerski). Until the townlands project got going they were still the major source of places in rural Ireland. Still a lot of dedup & other cleanup needed.
I also did a bit with them for Pakistan, but never could trust the data in a country where the population had increased so much : http://sk53-osm.blogspot.com/2011/03/garmin-overlays-of-gnis-names.html (probably should correct GNIS->GNS