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Google Map Maker will be temporarily unavailable for editing
- nkozyra 11y ago'This is why we can't have nice things'
- learnstats2 11y agoWhy, exactly? Is it because Google asked for a bunch of free work to support its commercial interests without providing any oversight at all? And now they won't provide the resources to fix their problem? Doesn't it seem likely that one of Google's goals here was just to compete with and thus extinguish existing free services? Is that why we can't have nice things?
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoI'm curious, now that you've mentioned it. There's clearly evidence to support us not having nice things because of childish pranks. Where's the evidence to support Google's goal was just to extinguish free services? Do you have any links or anything to show what you mean?
- Fogest 11y agoI am pretty sure that was a baseless argument just to hate on Google.
- rmc 11y agoExcept that OpenStreetMap is a real wiki map and is producing a real map to rival Google Maps. We can have nice things, We have OSM
- sebgeelen 11y agoI wonder how the edits could be pre-review by an image analysis tool, that will auto detect if the submitted path is a text or a logo. Might speed up the manual process.
- anc84 11y agoThe Android pissing on Apple was created step by step with shapes that by itself looked totally clean. This would not work.
- mcintyre1994 11y agoSort of. Here's their list of edits: http://www.google.com/mapmaker?gw=66&ptab=1&uid=200619129451972425213&start=10&sort= http://www.google.com/mapmaker?gw=66&ptab=1&uid=200619129451... (should be page 3), the Apple at the bottom would be reasonable to expect a human to catch. Not so much for a logo seeking algorithm, but it's not a clean simple shape. On page 4 the android head stands out too, again a human moderating could be expected to spot that.
- daw___ 11y agoMore on the 'most recent incident': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9432504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9432504
- JosephRedfern 11y agoThis was posted yesterday, too - previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519535
- bitL 11y agoThis is probably one of the worst responses Google could take - who is going to enjoy waiting weeks/months for their change to be reviewed and added to a map when the whole point of community editing was to enable near-realtime changes to map observed by people living in the area? Throwing out the baby with the bath water. One prank and the whole community suffers beyond reasonable limits.
- sidcool 11y agoProbably the prank cost them too much. We don't know what happened behind the scenes. They might have just dodged a lawsuit.
- vesinisa 11y agoIf they allow unreviewed community edits to the map, why don't they also allow users to revert changes by others? This is how Wikipedia deals with vandalism at least.
- jpatokal 11y agoWikipedia's policy is radically open as far as these things go, and only works because a) they're willing to tolerate vandalism being public for short (and, sometimes, long) periods of time, and b) they have an insanely large dedicated army of volunteers maintaining it.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoPeople with a bit of patience? It's really not that long to wait. And if it keeps childish acts such as this from happening, we're all the better for it.
- rmc 11y agoHopefully those mappers will move over to OSM where their changes are saved and shown within minutes.
- anc84 11y agoIf you love map editing and collaborating on better map data for the people, http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://www.openstreetmap.org/ is available for editing. You can choose from a multitude of editors, your edits are live within minutes and everyone can benefit from your contributions. OSM is free and open, you can download it all, you can do whatever you want with it, you are not feeding a corporation that might or might not appreciate your sacrifice.
- MatthewWilkes 11y agoMapMaker was great for selfish reasons, though. My postcode had the wrong bounding box and some new roads were missing from it, MapMaker made it possible for me to get deliveries much more easily.
- Piskvorrr 11y agoFor the very same selfish reasons, I've made some OSM edits. Now I (and incidentally, everyone else) get better geocoding, better (foot+bike+car) routing, and a list of useful POIs :)
- liotier 11y agoAlso, in return for your contributions, all you get from Google is a single map rendering whereas Openstreetmap offers a multitude of them, the possibility of making your own and the whole source data that Google will never let you see but that you need for any sort of analytical processing or joining with other datasets !
- detaro 11y agoMaybe the way Microsoft is doing it really is the better one: give resources to OpenStreetMap and let them take care of the community work. Both sides win.
- maxerickson 11y agoDoes Microsoft use OSM data for anything? They provide a lot of server resources by allowing OSM to reference Bing satellite/aerial imagery, but I've never seen any direct use of the data (they could certainly be using it ways that are not obvious).
- detaro 11y agoI thought they sourced their map data in parts from OSM, and there is/was(?) a OSM map layer in Bing. Even more important than the server resources probably is licensing the image data.
- Doctor_Fegg 11y agoFamously they used the outlines of military areas, as mapped in OSM, to decide where to blur their satellite imagery...
- rmc 11y ago> Does Microsoft use OSM data for anything? Ensuring Google Maps has a compeditor?
- Demiurge 11y agoThis is not a new problem. You just cant trust an individual, even with a long history. The solution is to have individuals check up on each other. If some users are interested in drawing, other users should be interested in moderating.
- icebraining 11y agoAnd then you end up with the interminable whining regarding the moderation - see Wikipedia, StackExchange, etc.
- malka 11y agoThey can handle those using the classic google support pipeline. ie straigth to the garbage bin.
- Piskvorrr 11y agoWhat humans do on the interwebs matches exactly what humans do in real life. I don't think there's a technical way to avoid that.
- rmc 11y agoOSM has less whining, probably because there is often less amibugity. Someone on StackExchange might wonder if a question is really off-topic, but on OSM, there'll be very little disagreement about whether the thing is a lake or a postbox.
- Piskvorrr 11y agoOSM is helped by the On The Ground Rule, in other words, physical world is the canonical source. There's quite enough disagreement in secondary tags (e.g. "smoothness" of a way), but having a universal canonical source (whatever is physically there) helps immensely with conflicts between data sources (sometimes from three data sources, you can get five data points, neither of which matches the physical feature ;)). https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputes#On_the_Ground_Rule https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputes#On_the_Ground_R...
- clockwerx 11y agoI think that http://tasks.hotosm.org/ http://tasks.hotosm.org/ has the balance of edit, review down pat.
- graemian 11y agoMajor strategic blunder: the whole world was updating their proprietary map data for them, but they failed to engineer the process to be spam-proof. Now they've had to stop accepting contributions as a result. Many contributors are likely to switch to updating someone else's map data, and Google risks no longer having the most up-to-date maps of the entire planet. Larry Page needs to kick some ass.
- smackfu 11y ago>they failed to engineer the process to be spam-proof That's a bit naive. They have been getting business spam constantly from the day they opened. Like businesses marking their competitors as closed, or moving their own location so it is closer to their customers.
- Piskvorrr 11y ago"Spam-proof" is, since the beginning of (unix)time, an ever-receding ideal, not a point that you could actually reach, or even reach and hold. I believe that in the continuum between "lots of spam, some data" and "no spam, but also no data" a point needs to be chosen (and re-chosen) which is "good enough." Shutting the whole thing down is IMNSHO not this point, and certainly an overreaction.
- buyx 11y agoI'm not a protectionist, but Google Maps has been damaging high quality local mapping services because of its zero price-point. It is technically the best mapping service, but when the data is wrong, it is very wrong, and, the bigger the problems, the tougher it is to get them fixed, even using Map Maker. After 2000, South African local governments were restructured. New municipalities were created by amalgamating formerly separate towns. The boundaries of those defunct towns are visible on Google Maps (as they should be, as an aid to navigation, since the new municipalities are huge). The problem is that the boundaries of these defunct amalgamated towns are totally wrong on Google Maps, especially in the cases of the City of Johannesburg, and Ekurhuleni Municipality. Suburbs like Emmmarentia and Parkhurst in Johannesburg are supposedly in Randburg according to Google Maps, and this leads to enormous confusion when looking up addresses. Similarly, the boundaries of Bedfordview in Ekurhuleni are wrong. Trying to fix these boundary issues is futile, because one has no idea what criteria are used in moderation, and it takes a very long time to do these fixes, only to risk having them rejected. Google needs to invest more in Maps, rather than trying to get away on the cheap with half-baked crowdsourcing, and it needs to make sure that it responds to error reports quickly and transparently.
- paganel 11y agoThree of four years ago GMaps used to display as open and operating a highway linking my city (Bucharest) to another city 40 miles away. The problem was that that highway was in no way open nor operating, as it was still under construction. I completed that "this-place-is-wrong"-form describing the issue and received a message back saying that bla-bla-bla the map is correct and I am wrong. That only increased my reliance on trusted paper maps from that day on.
- SeanDav 11y agoThis reminds me of a similar problem with wikipedia. A well known celebrity (Author I think) noticed that his birth date was incorrect. He tried to get it changed, even stating that he was the actual person and knows his own birthday - only to have it rejected as not from a good enough source!
- 11y ago
- fnordfnordfnord 11y agoIt was practically unavailable in my area anyway. I'd already grown tired of fixing some really bad errors on the maps surrounding my neighborhood and workplace only to have the fixes reverted by someone or something else.
- T3RMINATED 11y agogot an indian working on it no wonder.
- Achshar 11y agoHow awesome would it be if all the big players contributed their effort to one open source platform. Much like how WC3 works. Everyone would benefit from the work they do and they can instead compete on the features or the front end they provide to their users. If google moves their data to openstreetmap then everyone stays up to date including google.
- jfoster 11y agoThe optimist in me says that this announcement is prelude to Google opening up their map data like you describe. Probably not, though.
- rmc 11y agoOSM will eventually overtake Google Maps and others, so I predict GMaps will eventually use OSM. Importing GMaps data into OSM would be a programming nightmare, and is basically never going to happen. Trying to merge those 2 databases! Yikes!
- Piskvorrr 11y agoProgramming would be the lesser of the nightmares involved: merging whatever n databases that Google has (licensed under something, only Google knows what), with ODbL-licensed OSM data would be the real nightmare. Opening closed data is always a pain.
- rmc 11y agoLicencing can be solved by the correct person in authority signing a bit of paper. Merging millions of roads in OSM with millions in GMaps?
- Piskvorrr 11y agoThat's the programmers' equivalent of "any matter programming can be solved by a smart person typing on a computer for a little while, there's nothing to it." That said, I do acknowledge that merging two global datasets would be a nightmare.
- beyti 11y agoFor the people who didn't know the related prank like me, which led to this result: here is a quick summary about it: http://techaeris.com/2015/04/24/google-android-mascot-shown-on-google-maps-urinating-on-apple/ http://techaeris.com/2015/04/24/google-android-mascot-shown-...
- Fogest 11y agoEveryone is suggesting OSM here, but I am confused how OSM is any better at keeping out these kinds of spam based edits, especially if it is someone who has made a lot of edits? From what I have seen it would be open to the same kind of problem.
- Piskvorrr 11y agoIt's way faster at responding to incorrect edits (be they errors/mistakes/vandalism), in my experience. Spam etc. is unavoidable, as with any wiki-type project, but there are (well documented) mechanisms for dealing with it (as opposed to Google's "just drop us a note, and we might take a look, eventually, maybe"). Anecdote: I have tagged a street as "private access only" - and within hours, another mapper contacted me, asked if I took pedestrians into account (I didn't - the access restriction was actually for vehicles), and corrected my edit. Another time I have noticed that a street nearby changed type from "residential" to "secondary" (which does have real-life impacts, e.g. maximum allowed speed); checked IRL and with the mapper, and edited the map to better reflect the actual state.
- Fogest 11y agoAny edits I have made on Google Maps have also had the same kind of responses within a day or two. Sure you have to wait a little longer, that makes sense. It really depends on your area in Google Maps. My neighbourhood is barely in OSM, and when editing it I wasn't seeing any other editors in that area.
- Piskvorrr 11y agoIndeed, that's one place where OSM's community status becomes also its weakness: coverage is correlated to other mappers' activity. As for the response - my point lies more with its openness: with GMaps, a correction disappears into a black box, and may be rejected for whatever reason (see the example with wrongly mapped highway somewhere in this thread). With OSM, the mapping criteria are documented, starting with "the map reflects what is out there" - specifically because even official data sources are buggy, and thus only deuterocanonical to meatspace.
- mukundmr 11y agoIt is a welcome move if they are able to figure out a solution to retain quality. This problem exits more prominently in Google translate where people game the system and I guess that the translation is supposed to correct itself over a period of time with people fixing the mistake.