I wish Potlatch2 gave better tools for adding source easily. For example: similarly to how R replicates all tags from the last touched object of the same class (which is awesome), so S or Ctrl-R or some hotkey should replicate just the last entered source.

I know this is not the place for Potlatch wishlist (although now that I typed this up I might just create a Trac ticket :), but I'm just trying to explain why I, for one, am being bad about stating the source. Too much work, too little to show for it (literally).

I suppose we could at least add the source to the changeset, if that helps.

Ponzu, I found out quite recently, the key "B" shortcut for Potlatch2. Just press it in same manner as "R" replicates, and "B" puts in the current background as the Source - great for when u are tracing from Bing or the like.

Please don't use source=* on single objects. Instead, use it on the changeset. On a node with several tags, nobody knows which tag (or maybe its position?) the source tag refers to. If you feel that you use multiple sources for your changeset, either make your changeset smaller, state all sources or further elaborate your changes in the changeset comment.

@Chaos99 That works if every item in a changeset has the same source, but not if they don't. As for sourcing individual tags (if it's necessary, which it usually isn't!) Taginfo shows that "source:blah" is well-used and accepted.

Basically - use whatever's needed to communicate with future mappers, whether that's changeset source tags, item source tags or even something more granular.

@SomeoneElse I've already mentioned splitting the changeset, giving multiple sources and using the changeset comment. source:bla indeed solves the reference issue, but still pollutes the database. We should at least use the method most suited to the specific task. 10000x "source=BING arial imagery" on building outlines doesn't give us any more info than once on the changeset.

Yes, and it is also helpful to try to avoid "big" changesets, and make them small enough that the description is precisely referring to the actual changes made.

sometimes with potlatch2 I start editing and save and give a description of the edit, then go on editing and the program doesn't ask me for a new description... so my second save inherits a description that isn't necessarily correct.

You can ask Potlatch 2 to close a changeset by pressing "c". Then the next time that you save, it'll ask you for a new changeset comment.

In general I'd say this is not so much a "common mapping mistake" but more of a thing we'd like new users to "graduate" onto doing, once they're getting the hang of editing. I don't think it should be regarded as essential, or rude not to. I do always try to add a good comment. Techy people are very fastidious about this kind of thing, but it might take some new users a while to pick up the habit, and that's fine.

@miriotomo yes. I make the same mistake quite a lot when dipping into Potlatch editing. I know about the 'c' button, but tend to save by mistake expecting to be asked (like in JOSM)

@SomeoneElse You might want to add "and creating changesets than span continents". It's exactly the same problem, as the following mappers can't see what has happened. It also completely breaks the history page of openstreetmap.org.

This is perhaps part of the same problem as the "unjoined ways" problem. If people see the standard map tiles on osm.org as the "output" of their mapping rather than the data itself, then they won't think that self-intersecting ways are wrong.

As with unjoined ways, it's an education thing - once people have been told what's correct, they're more likely to do it right!

Bing offsets are frequent in its satellite imagery (correct medium resolution but imagery is not rectified) : Africa, Russia, Canada, Latin America, most of Asia.

But in US and most of Europe, where high-resolution orthophotography is available, this is no longer a problem as most areas are covered (but there remains a few spots in Europe only covered by satellite, e.g. Corsica, Sardinia and Sicilia, most of Switzerland and Austria, a North-West sector in Germany near the Netherlands, and about one half of UK).

I'd disagree that "this is no longer a problem" in Europe where aerial photography is available. Maybe 100m offsets are a thing of the past there, but imagery still needs aligning.

Getting the topology to match what's on the ground is important to routers too - it makes the difference between "take the second exit from the roundabout" and "take the first exit".

What's the correct way to tag which way is discharged into the other?

you do it geometrically, if it is not clear maybe it really isn't clear in the particular situation.

If you are after names or reference numbers you could see these as well, but in some special cases the name (maybe even the ref) don't follow the "main flow". (e.g. could imagine a road intersection, where continuing leads to a higher road and the current ref turns into "another" road).

I know this subject has been pounded into the dirt, however, the primary/secondary/tertiary and footway/cycleway/pedestrian/path distinctions seem to cause the most troubles.

In Portugal and Cyprus I have entered roads with highway=road because it is impossible to rate them on a survey. However all these have been edited to highway=unclassified.

In Cyprus, even some dense residential areas do not have street names but block names (eg Sea View Gardens on one side of the road and Sunset Villas on the other) and I still have not figured out how to name the highway=residentials.

I have sometimes used landuse=residential name=Sunset Villas but what about the addresses when one side of road belongs to Sunset Villas and the other to Sea View Gardens?

This is not a forum. You should convert your comment to a new question ;-)

You can see this quite often in Italy: highest highway class in urban centres (sometimes quite big ones with place=city) is tertiary or unclassified. All primaries stop before the city and restart after it. Up to some time ago even Milan had only tertiary streets inside the city, but fortunately this is slightly improving now.

That's a good one! I only recently started converting some of the streets that I (and others) had tagged as tertiary to unclassified. I had completely misread originally what unclassified meant. And I do live in one of those countries, for which this classification means little. I don't know if this is cheating, but when in doubt I peek at Google Maps. They only have two colors: white and yellow. I have decided that Google's yellow covers our primary, secondary and tertiary. If a road is not yellow in Google, I tend not to tag it higher than unclassified. Or is that another mistake? ;)

Fortunately, this is enabled by default.

Oh, that's right, it is. My mistake. I must have forgotten that early on I disabled it so I could see the pretty slippy map background clearly.