I recently purchased some very rural land with a cabin that I put on AirBnB. The address is a different road than the driveway is and all the maps took drivers around 1 mile away with no way to find the actual driveway. I had to go through the process of fixing this on Google, Apple, and open street maps. OSM was by far the easiest and my updates propagated within minutes. Google was the second easiest but still took me deep into the “feedback” menu and then a week or two of waiting. Apple was by far the worst as I had to sign up for an Apple business account, upload incorporation docs, and then go through multiple rounds of back and forth with some approval agent.

I was put off by co tributing to osm at first when someone brought up that 300mb java monster application at first actually. Luckily i found there's an online editor and did my first edits there. I would definitely not recommend josm for a newcommer

On iPhone, so far "Go Map!!" works well for my simple edits, which are things I notice while walking on the sidewalk.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Go_Map!!

(The double exclamation marks in the name drove me away initially, so I tried 3 others first, none of which worked well on the iPhone for my edits, but then "Go Map!!" seemed to just work.)

For edits that can be done from desktop, the OSM official Web site's editor was pretty good -- complicated, but seems to work, and has a nice interactive tutorial mode.

How does OSM prevent trolling or vandalism? Since many (most) courier companies rely on OSM for their database a bad "joke" could prove very frustrating to many people.

> Do NOT use search results for social media profiles

This seems a bit outdated as many restaurants/shops now consider they FB/insta page as their "official" website (or rather lack of).

I hope the author reconsiders recommending JOSM to beginners. iD, StreetComplete, MapComplete…almost anything except JOSM would have been a better starting point.

Contributing to OSM was super cool. I've had an issue where my home snaps to the nearest road, which is in fact fenced off from us, rather than the road that our cul de sac connects to (which was not well marked in OSM). Last week, I went in and in about ten minutes used the visual editor to paint in the driveway, read a quick wiki page on how to correctly label driveways, and then submitted it. I got a pleasant jump scare the next time I doordashed some food and saw the little driveway squiggles I added on the map in the doordash app, and then again for lyft -- such a cool feeling!

Would highly recommend the web editor -- what's proposed here looks super comprehensive but way more difficult to use for a first timer.

Funny enough, Cafe Lolo, the business that the example edit demonstrates, replaced my favorite restaurant in Seattle, Cookweaver. The chef-owner of Cookweaver is now doing private events and in-home meals for folks who miss his cooking: https://www.cookweaver.com/omakase-menu

So, I read the article, downloaded JOSM and start making edits on my neighborhood (including adding new poligons, buildings, etc).

Soon I thought "This would be easily done by an AI" and searched for it and found META's Rapid (https://rapideditor.org/) which does an ok job finding buildings, but really could go further and suggest the tags as well.

One thing to note: OSM edits are associated with your account. Do not use your regular user name, or people can easily identify where you live since people tends to edit nearby locations.

If you accidentally did that, I believe there's a way for the admin to scrub that for you.