The MapRoulette Blog

Liking and Flagging Challenges

Published: in Feature by .

MapRoulette was designed to be an open, self-governing platform for OSM improvement tasks. This has worked well, but from time to time, changes are made in OSM based on MapRoulette tasks that were not clearly formulated, or the assumptions behind the task are wrong. On the other hand, we have Challenges in MapRoulette that are […]

Tutorial: tagging parking=surface efficiently with a MapRoulette Tag-Fix Challenge

Published: in Tutorial by .

Americans love cars. More than 90% of households own one, more than 20% of households own 3 or more. Cars stand still most of the time and for that, we need huge amounts of parking. Image source: Flickr Commons The simplest way to map a parking area in OSM is to draw an area and […]

MapRoulette at State of the Map

Published: in Event, News by .

If you’re reading this, chances are that you are excited about the upcoming State of the Map conference in Firenze, Italy! Whether you are attending in person or virtually, lots to look forward to. I will be presenting on “10 years of MapRoulette” on the first day of the conference. The presentation is coming together […]

Introducing Challenge Health Measures

Published: in Uncategorized by .

I want everyone to enjoy fixing and improving OpenStreetMap with MapRoulette. Whenever I talk to MapRoulette users, I ask them what the one single thing is that I could do to improve their time spent using MapRoulette. The answer I get by far the most frequently is: “Please do something about old and irrelevant tasks!” […]

State of the Map 2021 Report: A Global Community, and Task-Based Editing is hot!

Published: (Updated: ) in Event, , by .

State of the Map, the OpenStreetMap conference, just wrapped up yesterday in its second online year. It was, as always, an exciting opportunity for the community and data users to connect and exchange ideas and new developments from the OpenStreetMap world. If I had to point out one single highlight, it would have to be […]

New MapRoulette Challenge to verify level_crossing tagging correctness

Published: (Updated: ) in Challenge by .

This is a guest post by Alex Iannicelli and Yunzhi Li from Facebook. Throughout the United States there are many places where railways intersect with highways to create “Level Crossings”. Representing these intersections in OSM correctly can improve renderings and routing algorithms. To help improve these intersections we recently created a MapRoulette challenge to verify level_crossing […]

Guest Post: Tracing Reservoirs in the USA

Published: in Uncategorized by .

This post was written by OSM and MapRoulette user Brian M. Sperlongano, who also created the Project this post talks about. Did you know that there are tens of thousands of potentially unmapped reservoirs in the USA? An early import from the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) added a massive numbers of reservoirs, however, these […]

Tips For Solving MapRoulette Tasks In A Small Area

Published: (Updated: ) in Tutorial by .

MapRoulette is designed to let you map wherever the tasks are. This means that, depending on the Challenge, you can be mapping in Indonesia one minute, and in South Africa the next. We think this is part of what makes MapRoulette fun! But sometimes, you may want to just stay in a specific area. MapRoulette […]

Using Overpass to create Challenges

Published: (Updated: ) in Tutorial by .

This post also appears on the MapRoulette Learn web site. You will find many more resources there to get the most out of MapRoulette, including how-tos, screencasts and reference documentation. Overpass is a powerful query language for OSM. You can ask it things like “Show me all water fountains in Rome” or “Show me banks […]

MapRoulette Throwback Monday: The Remap-A-Thon

Published: in Random by .

Did you know that MapRoulette started out as The OpenStreetMap US Remap-A-Thon? There was only one Challenge: to repair the road network in the United States after OpenStreetMap changed its data license from Creative Commons to the Open Database License. Mapping data from contributors who did not agree to this change, or could not be […]