Exactly. Just add what’s missing yourself. It’s kinda fun to edit the map of your local area and its super helpful for others.

Okay but I don’t need a map for places I know well enough to edit and I don’t really find myself randomly looking at maps of areas I know well

You can let the whole world know that it is 3.2 miles to boonhet’s house. Party time! /s

No idea who went and downvoted me for a fact that applies to probably 99% of the world’s population. Anyway, I did go and add several missing local businesses, removed defunct ones and relocated some government services that were showing locations they hadn’t been at for like 20 years. But my point stands, unless you go out of your way like I just did, you usually don’t naturally find yourself looking at OSM for the places you’re most qualified to update.

I use Google maps a lot to check opening hours of local restaurants. I thought I’d try that with an OSM app, and most of the places weren’t even there. I’d never trust the details of those that were.

On the other hand, my cycling computer uses OSM data and it’s quite complete enough for that purpose. With a couple of exceptions that I just remember that I need to correct.

OSM doesn’t really “pull” data. The vast majority is sourced by hand, and adding data from existing sources is a complicated process that requires a lot of preparation and cleaning up afterwards. So basically all of it is a community effort - and a single contributor can make a significant contribution to the project

Maybe “pull” was the wrong word. However, looking at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/History_of_OpenStreetMap I see:

• 4th December 2006 – Yahoo! aerial imagery sketching allowed…
• September 2007 – TIGER data import for the US started
• 20th September 2007 – AND Data for The Netherlands imported
• 1st April 2010 – Ordnance Survey Opendata releases.
• 30th November 2010 – Use of Bing vertical aerial imagery allowed

And on https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contributors it shows well over a hundred counties/regions with hundreds(?) of non-user data sources/sets that are used by OSM to maintain the map.

Edit: clarity.

Wel yes, sketching is exactly the manual labor I was talking about. The TIGER import was indeed massive and very automated, but the US community is to this day working on reviewing it. The Dutch situation is very similar - because it had early, high quality open data. In countries were data was released later or of poorer quality, the OSM map had already been filled up to a degree that doing these massive imports became very hard. Majority opinion is that that’s actually a good thing - it seems like countries where the map was filled organically (both by hand alone or also with smaller, slower imports) have a more thriving mapper community. I don’t think the Ordnance Survey data was used for a massive imports, but rather as one source during the mapping process (the others being notes from going there yourself, open street view images, aerial or satellite imagery, …). As an example, here in Belgium we started importing buildings around 2019, which you can clearly see here. But it only sped up an existing process of adding those buildings to the map.